Always preferring to play it safe rather than sorry, Bridget approached the body cautiously. An adult man. Face down. A white shirt stuck to broad shoulders. Tight trousers. Bare feet. Seaweed in his longish, water-darkened hair.
A wave came in, and the body moved.
Dragged itself higher up the beach, floating on the tide and at the same time clawing with its hands at the pebbles.
Not dead!
The water slurped back out and the man’s head fell to the side.
“Colm!” Bridget screamed.
Not a scintilla of doubt obtained. This was her brother.
She dropped the fishing rod, grabbed him under the armpits, rolled him on his back. He was unconscious. His skin felt like ice.
He coughed. Opened his eyes. His pupils were pinpoints.
“What the hell are you doing here, Colm?”
“Came to save you from the Ghosts, of course.”
Bridget laughed so hard that tears came to her eyes. “Did you swim from the mainland?”
“Only from the ship,” Colm mumbled, and seemed to pass out again. His chest rose and fell shallowly. Bridget slapped his face in fright.
His eyes opened again. She recoiled from the naked fear in those shrunken pupils. “Help me, Bridget. I’m so sorry. I’ve taken an overdose.”
*
“But where’ve you been, Colm?”
He thought the voice was Diejen’s. He tried to answer but his lips seemed to be glued shut. One minute he’d been juggling apples in a field on Atletis and the next minute he’d been drowning in the sea beneath the tail of a spaceship. The current was strong. He’d barely made it to shore.
“Where’ve you been?”
The agony of the transit gripped him again—a vivid memory, replaying as a dream, but it felt so real. He knew now how the Ghosts flitted. They deconstructed themselves into zero-gravity, zero-mass entities—souls, you might say—and travelled at the speed of thought … not quite instantaneously … not fast enough to escape the tearing, wrenching sensation of being naked in the zero-gravity field, stripped of skin and bones and everything, your soul exposed to the primeval violence of this fallen universe.
“Colm! Colm …”
He suddenly recognized the voice. It was his mother’s. He opened his eyes and tried to smile. He was lying on a red vinyl couch in front of a fire, with a blanket over him. “I’ve been with the Ghosts, Mam. Listen, they’re not so bad ...”
Daisy Mackenzie’s face fell. Colm pushed himself upright. The shivering and shaking of withdrawal had passed off. He felt human again. People surrounded the couch. His family. Axel and Meg. An older couple he didn’t know. He started to explain about Kisperet, about Dhjerga Lizp and the Families and their rebellion against the Magus, but he could see it wasn’t taking. They thought he was raving, or if he wasn’t, that would be worse. They said it was great to see him awake, and hopefully he’d feel better soon, and then they drifted away.
Only Axel stayed behind. “So it all really happened,” he said.
Colm struggled off the couch. He didn’t know how to express his gratitude for Axel’s free gift of his body and expertise. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Axel screwed up his face in thought. “The chainsaw bayonets,” he said eventually.
Colm grinned. “Those were awesome, weren’t they?”
“You’re not a real Marine until you’ve used a chainsaw bayonet,” Axel answered, and then he said, “But the memories are fading.” He drove his hands into his trouser pockets, hunching his shoulders to his ears. “They can’t fade too soon for me.”
Meg came back into the room, carrying the baby. “Ah, he’s adorable. Hello, Nicky,” Colm started. The baby was a lot bigger than when Colm had last seen him on board the Shihoka; a toddler, actually. How long had Colm’s transit from Kisperet taken? Nicky looked about two. He had dark blond curls and a grubby face. His brown eyes regarded the stranger with distrust. Meg handed him off to Axel, without acknowledging Colm.
“I’m going out hunting.”
Colm leapt at the chance to reconnect with her. “I’ll go too, if that’s all right with you.”
“You’re a junkie,” Meg said, with withering contempt.
“I’m feeling fine.”
“You can’t shoot.”
“I’m a lot better than I used to be.”
“There’s only one rifle.”
Colm realized that she didn’t want him along. He was about to back down when she shrugged off her raincoat.
“Fine, you can go instead of me. Don’t waste ammo.” She tossed him the raincoat and went back upstairs.
Axel said, “The ammo’s almost gone. But Meg’s got a backup plan. She’s made a bow out of PVC pipe and rawhide. Now she’s making arrows out of rabbit bones!” His eyes pleaded with Colm not to take offense at Meg’s tetchiness.
“Why don’t you use the ship to fetch more ammo? And anything else you need?” Colm said.
“Colm … the Magus won.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“We may have won on Atletis, but it took too long. An army of Ghosts can do a whole lot of damage in a few months.”
“You’re saying everything’s gone?”
“Dunno,” Axel said. “Maybe not everything. But I’m not gonna risk the ship, and my life, to find out. I’ve got this little guy to think about.” He turned his face away, blowing a raspberry at Nicky to make him smile.
CHAPTER 34
IF THIS WAS THE end of the world, Colm’s first choice would have been to get drunk. That clearly wasn’t an option, so he decided he really would go hunting. He headed for the boot room.
This building was not actually a house but a visitor center formerly run by Scotland’s tourism agency. Bridget had explained that a couple of Visit Scotland employees used to live here during the tourist season. The Mackenzie group had taken over the upstairs flat, the shop, the waiting room—that was where the fire was—and the kitchen behind the shop, where everyone was presently hanging out around the gas stove. Colm smiled awkwardly at them.
Wellies and coats crammed the entryway. Colm’s waterlogged boots stuck out like a sore thumb for their fine workmanship and the colorful tassels around their tops. He borrowed someone else’s wellies, and took the .22 hunting rifle down from its shelf.
“Want some company?”
His head jerked around. There stood his father, togged up in waterproofs. Oh, no.
“All right.”
“You don’t know your way around yet. I’ll give you the grand tour.”
They climbed up from the beach into the forested interior of the island. Although Lloyd Mackenzie looked thinner and grayer than Colm remembered, he sustained a spanking pace. Colm struggled to keep up with him. As for shooting squirrels, the rifle felt too heavy to carry, let alone fire. He caught his father grinning, at his unfitness, he thought. They came out on top of the cliffs, facing west across the sea. The rain hid the outer islands.
Lloyd pointed. “There’s where I want to go,” he said. “Skye.”
Colm gave him a surprised glance. His great-grandfather had owned a house on the Isle of Skye: the Free Church Manse. In his Fleet days, Colm had dreamed about saving enough money to buy it and fix it up. He had never mentioned this ambition to his father. “Do you think there’re Ghosts on the island?” he said.
“Doubt it,” Lloyd said. “They don’t do boats. There used to be a bridge but the government took it down years ago, when there was that mania for putting everything back the way nature intended it ... bloody nonsense.” Lloyd shaded his eyes against the rain. “The wolves’ll be taking over the place soon enough. It was a mistake re-introducing those bastards. Maybe they’ll eat the Ghosts.”
Lloyd paused. Colm felt that he was expected to defend the Ghosts. He did not. Instead, he said, “I wonder if Great-Grandfather’s house is still there.”
“That’s where I want to go. That house is warded against evil.” Lloyd’s eyes gleamed with a hint
of vulnerability. In the old days, Colm would have scoffed or walked out if Lloyd ever said anything like that.
“The Ghosts aren’t evil,” he said neutrally. “They’re just people who lost their way. People like me.” He paused. “People like you.”
Lloyd spat off the cliff. “Then off you go to the mainland and convince them of that.”
Colm hefted the rifle. “Give them time,” he said, seething inside. “They’ll come to themselves, and then they’ll be all right.” He hoped this was true. Didn’t know if it would be true, as long as the Magus remained on the loose. He pretended to shoot at the birds swooping above the sea. “I wonder can you eat seagulls?”
“Fucking nasty,” his father said. “We’ve tried.”
Everyone was thin and cross. It wasn’t just Meg, although she was the angriest of all, refusing to so much as meet Colm’s eyes, much less talk to him. The rest of them, though, weren’t specifically angry with Colm. He realized quickly that they had no spare mental energy to worry or be curious about his bizarre return. Every moment was dedicated to finding food or thinking about ways to find food. His mother and Sunita Wilson doled out half a potato and a chunk of mackerel to each adult and child for supper.
Burning with anger at the situation, Colm bunked down on the floor in the waiting room. The couch had only been his while he was recovering from his overdose. Now he slept on the floor with Axel, Meg, Bridget, Ted, Morag, and Ivor, in a miasma of unwashed human bodies and potato farts. Scarlett and Nicky had the couch. The older generation had the single bedroom upstairs. The fire burned low and Colm drifted off to sleep while wondering if there might be some tropo left on the Shihoka. He might swim out and have a look …
He awoke suddenly.
The fire was dying.
His parents’ new cat, Mickle, lay on the hearth. Her eyes gleamed in the dark.
Beside the fire, on the vinyl chair that matched the sofa, sat Lloyd and little Nicky.
The toddler sat astride Lloyd’s lap, his face pressed into Lloyd’s cardigan, the material bunched in his tiny hands as if he were holding on for dear life.
Lloyd had one arm wrapped around Nicky and with his other hand he was doing magic. Two sticks, tied together with twine in an X shape, floated up and down and back and forth in front of him, following Lloyd’s hand movements. He was levitating the sticks.
The shadows on the other side of the fireplace bunched deep and dark.
Colm silently untangled himself from his sleeping bag, eyes peeled in the gloom.
Something scraped in the shadows.
Mickle danced to her feet, hissing.
Lloyd moved the sticks faster, teeth bared, body hunched around the child.
Scrape. Scrape.
The toecap of an enormous boot slid into the firelight, and at the same time the fire sank low, guttering, as if a cold blast of wind had crept down the chimney.
Colm rose to his feet. He stepped over the sleeping Bridget and vaulted over the sofa. He grabbed the little rake that lay in front of the fire and drove it into the grate, scooping up embers.
Turning, lunging, he dashed the embers into the shadow’s unseen face.
His momentum carried him stumbling into the wall. The bricks were so cold that they burned his hands, and then there was nothing.
Nicky started to cry.
Lloyd hissed, “Pick up those fucking coals before you burn the place down!”
Colm hastily raked up the embers that had scattered in the corner. “That’s him sorted,” he said, while inside he was crying out: No, oh no … not here! Not my family, you fucker!
“I had it in hand,” Lloyd said. “Now you’ve scared the wean!” He stroked Nicky’s hair, comforting the terrified child with a tenderness Colm had never seen from him.
Bridget rose from her sleeping-bag. Taking in the situation in one glance, she plucked Nicky off Lloyd’s lap and deposited him on the floor between Axel and Meg. “He had a nightmare,” she explained in a whisper. Axel sleepily slung an arm around the boy and pulled him under the covers. Bridget came back to the fire. “All right,” she whispered. “I’ve had just about enough of this. Enough! What the hell is going on?”
Colm threw a glance into the corner. “It was the Magus.” He stretched his cold hands out to the fire.
“Is that what you call him, too?” Lloyd said.
“He’s a Ghost,” Colm said. “He’s the one I’ve been fighting all this time.”
“Aye well then, you need to raise your game,” Lloyd said. “He’s been hanging around us for months. Years! Recently it’s been every bloody night. He’s after the child.”
“Why?” Bridget said.
Lloyd shrugged. “I can handle him. He’s only an auld magician.”
“What were you doing with those sticks?” Colm said.
“Praying,” Lloyd said, with a croaky laugh. He picked up the X of sticks and tossed it into the fire. “Praying like our lives depend on it. Which they do.”
“Fire works, too,” Colm said.
“It works only because of you.” Lloyd hit Colm lightly on the shoulder. “You’ve come on …”
“I need tropo,” Colm muttered. He felt hobbled without it, his magic locked up in his brain. “You don’t need chemicals, Dad. You don’t have an implant …”
“Is that what they did to you? The fucking bastards.”
Lloyd was the first person ever to react the same way Colm had. The fucking bastards. “Yeah. But I can’t do anything without drugs …”
“You still have a lot to learn,” Lloyd said, in a tone that was almost kindly.
Bridget slapped her thighs. “This is ridiculous. You can’t keep on doing this every night, forever!”
“No,” Colm said. “You’re right, Bridgie. We can’t stay here. We need to move to Skye.”
Lloyd rose from his chair to coax Mickle the cat back to the fire. Colm remembered what had happened to the last cat they had. The memory fanned his hatred of his father all over again.
Lloyd picked up the small tabby and stroked her. “Aye, I’m all for it. But how are we to get there?”
“That’s easy,” Colm said. Here was something he could do. “We’ll go in the Shihoka.”
CHAPTER 35
DHJERGA LOOKED UP AT the Son Of Saturn. Timber chocks caged its base, to ensure it wouldn’t fall over. They looked flimsy beside its stupendous bulk.
“Just put them anywhere,” he shouted up to the Janzes, who were shepherding his nukes up the ladder in rope cradles.
He and the spaceship were alone in the field outside the village. Over the last few days everyone had scattered. Some had gone back to Kisperet, others to seek their friends and relations on the conquered worlds. The twins had gone, too. Lady Terrious and one of her daughters were staying on Atletis; they had gone upstream to look for somewhere to build a dam. Looking for a way back to the past.
Dhjerga knew the old ways were dead. The pavilion flapped in the wind.
“Sir?”
Alone? He wasn’t alone, of course. Several hundred copies stood in the field, the newer ones blank-faced, the older ones visibly confused by the lack of orders to follow. They couldn’t understand why their masters had gone away and left them. Among them, the surviving Marines had removed their battlesuits and were scrounging amidst the rubble of the banquet. At five months old, they were the eldest copies on Atletis, and had more or less come to themselves. They could manage the others.
“Sir? What are our orders?”
He turned to the not-Janz that had addressed him. His face was so familiar, and yet soon he would be someone else. “No more orders,” he said roughly, and started to climb the ladder. He passed the other not-Janzes on their way down without a word.
He reached the top, panting with exertion, and looked down. Vertigo tickled the backs of his eyeballs. Innismon appeared so tiny. The ridge, like a giant barrow. The grave of the Magistocracy. The slaves, staring up at him. He permitted himself a flight of fancy: perhaps
they were marvelling, in their half-formed minds, that he, Dhjerga Lizp, had mastered these alien technologies, the magic of nuclear reactions and computers.
Colm didn’t have what it took. Disappointment still rankled in Dhjerga’s heart when he thought about him. He had seemed like a man of principle but really he’d just been looking for a way out, and had flitted first chance he got. The twins had been furious with Dhjerga for helping him. He had tried to explain to them: he isn’t our savior, he’s got no sense of honor, you’re better off letting him go.
I’ll keep my promise, unlike some.
And maybe, just maybe, along the way, I’ll become the greatest mage that ever lived.
He flapped his arms at the watching copies in go-away gestures. Then he swung into the crew capsule and shut the door. He had no idea how the controls worked, but so what?
Seconds later, the watching multitude saw the Son Of Saturn vanish. The timber chocks toppled into the empty place where it had been, and crashed onto the flattened yellow grass.
*
Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth scuttled along the hot earth between ragfruit bushes. He raised his front half off the ground and squeezed an unripe fruit between two claws. “Hmm,” he said to his estate manager. “What do you think? Will these ripen before the sentrienza destroy the planet in a storm of nuclear fire?”
The estimated arrival of the Rigel fleet was just ten days away. Gil was certain that the sentrienza would arrive more or less on schedule. They never lied.
The estate manager, a human, gazed over the rows of bushes. “Perhaps our fleet will prevail,” he said, hopefully.
Gil said, “Perhaps,” but he had inspected the newly built fleet for himself. Fine ships … but not enough of them. To make matters worse, the logic of space combat inherently disadvantaged the defenders. They would have to disable every single sentrienza ship, counter every single attack. The attackers only had to get through once.
His heart heavy with forebodings, he had come home to his family estate at the north pole of Juradis, to tread one last time upon the land where he had been born. There had been good things, after all, about the Uzzizellan exile on Juradis. Rich soil, sweet water, warm sunshine. He inhaled the scent of the bushes, and wondered if their ashes would fertilize new crops, someday, for the next hapless species to be lured into the sentrienza’s embrace.
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