“She still doesn’t want to tell you,” Lloyd said. “So I will. I’m very sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Axel, but Nicky is not your child. I’m guessing he’s Colm’s.”
Colm stood frozen. His single night with Meg, on the Unsinkable, repeated on him in tones of the starkest horror. That had been two and a half years ago, a bit more. Oh God, the timing fit. “Did you know, Meg?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you say?”
He was moving towards her when a brick wall collided with the side of his face. He staggered and fell, catching himself on the table, knocking cups and plates to the floor. Axel had punched him with all the force of a Marine’s fist. He grabbed Colm’s shoulder with his left hand and swung him upright, hauling off to punch him again.
Ted grappled Axel from behind, trying to pin his arms.
Colm let his hands fall to his sides, offering his aching face. “Go on, Axel. Hit me again. I deserve it.”
Instead of taking the invitation, Axel let out a raw howl. He shook Ted off and stalked out of the house. The back door slammed behind him, rattling the windows. Meg started up as if to follow him but then sank back.
Bridget broke the silence. “I’m not apologizing for my louse of a brother, but Dad, are you sure you’re right? Nicky doesn’t look like us at all.”
“Of course I’m sure,” Lloyd said. “I guessed it the moment the Magus first came sniffing around the child. He’d not have been interested in him if Nicky didn’t have magic in his blood. The last son born of the last druid family on Earth. As to his looks, he’s got a Japanese grandmother, has he not?”
Meg said in a dead voice, “It’s true. I had a DNA analysis done when I got pregnant. He’s not Axel’s. And I haven’t been with anyone else except …” She threw a glance at Colm. It held no love, nor hate. Just emptiness.
Colm crammed his hands into his eyes as the truth hit him over the head like Axel’s fist. He had visited the Unsinkable, and the Shihoka. He hadn’t replicated Dhjerga’s amazing feat of finding ships in the zero-gravity field. He’d just … had a fix on Nicky. A mage whom he had met, so to speak, even before he was born. Because he was his child.
“It’s blindingly obvious,” Lloyd said. The old bastard was enjoying this. “The Magus took him. He didn’t fetch away a copy of him and leave the child here. He took him. And you can’t do that with normal people, can you?”
“Nope. You can’t,” Colm said.
“He could not have done that unless the child was a mage.” Lloyd leaned forward, grasping the cat around the middle, addressing Meg. “What I’m puzzled about is your side. Is there magic in your family? On the Japanese side, maybe?”
“I can break concrete with my bare hands,” Meg said, in the same quiet, dead voice. “And I bet I could break your neck, too, Mr. Mackenzie. And I will, if you don’t fucking SHUT UP!!”
Lloyd sat back, blowing out an exaggerated breath. “All righty then.”
Colm pulled himself together. It felt like jamming together the pieces of a broken machine. He would never be the same again. “Never mind all this shite. We’ve got to get Nicky back, obviously. Where’s the Magus taken him? Oh, it doesn’t matter, I’ll find out.” He picked up his helmet.
“Hold on there,” his father said, dumping the cat off his lap. “I’m coming.”
CHAPTER 43
COLM STARED AT HIS father. Lloyd was seventy-two, skinny as a wraith, and he’d been an alcoholic most of his life. “Dad, I hate to break it to you, but you’re going to be fuck-all use in a fight.”
“It depends what kind of fight,” Lloyd said. He put his coat on. It was an old thing left over from his days performing as The Marvellous Mr. Mackenzie, a black duster with loads of hidden pockets.
Daisy sneered, “What are you gonnae do, Lloyd, juggle at the Magus?”
“Maybe I’ll turn him into a frog.”
Colm threw up his hands and went out to prep the Shihoka. While he was doing that, Meg came and talked to him. She talked for quite a long time, and by the end of it, Colm knew exactly what an oblivious, overbearing, selfish, unreliable asshole he’d been. All he could say was, “What did you ever see in me then?”
Meg snorted. “Something better than what was really there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Are you even listening to me?”
Colm had been running systems checks while she was talking. But he’d been listening, oh yes, he had. He looked around and saw her standing in the middle of the cockpit, fists clenched at her sides. Her old Fleet duffel lay at her feet. It was the one he’d been using on his foraging expeditions. He suddenly remembered the day they’d both been discharged from the Fleet, when she had turned up at that Hawaiian-themed bar on Gna with the same duffel over her shoulder. That was the night he’d met Zhanna. He’d have sold his soul to be able to go back in time and change his own behaviour—change himself—see what was in front of his eyes. If that night had gone differently, Zhanna would still be alive, and Colm and Meg might be living with Nicky and his theoretical siblings in a cozy little house on … well … a planet long since conquered by the Ghosts. So, no. Scratch that. All the same, he yearned for what might have been.
To say what he was thinking would only lead to more futile rehashing of the past, and Nicky was missing. So he said, “What’s in the bag?”
“My stuff, of course. I’m coming with you.”
“Ah, Meg …”
“I’ve got magic in my blood, apparently. What the fuck ever. But I don’t know how to do the flitting thing. So you have to take me.”
“And get you killed, as well?” It popped out. Meg’s face contorted with grief and rage.
“He is my fucking child!”
“Where’s Axel?”
“No idea. Ted said he took the boat.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“He’ll be all right,” Meg said bitterly. “I wish he hadn’t disabled his implant, but—”
“He disabled it again?” Colm groaned. He had too many memories of Axel doing self-destructive shit. He got up from his couch, careful not to go too close to her. “Meg … I’ve no right to ask you for anything. I’m an unreliable, selfish, oblivious asshole, as we’ve established …”
“And a user. Did I mention that? Look at the way you used Axel to fight your war.”
“That’s why I’m asking. Please go after him. Make sure he’s OK.”
“He can look after himself.”
“Maybe, but the others can’t. My mum, Bridget and Ted, the kids. Can I ask you to look after them while I’m away? Please, please?”
A heavy tread sounded in the companionway. “I hope and trust we’re not taking Missy Fibs-A-Lot,” Lloyd said.
Meg reddened. “I see where you get your charisma,” she spat at Colm. Quailing from Lloyd, she picked up her duffel and left without another word.
Colm shouted after her, “I won’t come back without him. I swear it on my life!”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Lloyd said. With his camera eyes, Colm watched Meg go down the airlock steps and trudge back towards the house. If cameras had tear ducts, the image of her small, hunched back would have been blurry.
“Goodbye, Gunny,” he whispered, and closed the airlock.
Lloyd was in the cabin. “Where should I put the cat?”
“You brought the bloody cat?!”
On the internal camera feed, Mickle scrambled out of Lloyd’s satchel, evaded his hands, and climbed the webbing on the aft wall.
“Kitty!” Lloyd wheezed. “Kitty, kitty!”
Colm lost patience. He grabbed his Nessie mug, stormed back into the cabin, hauled Mickle down from the webbing, and shoved her at his father. Then, spinning the mug on a boomerang-like trajectory around the cabin, he flitted.
*
He had had Nicky’s face in his mind, the living image of the child, dark blond curls matted with water, almond eyes
red-rimmed. Nicky was sitting on sparkling white sand. His mouth wobbled woefully. In the background, waves bubbled up some unknown beach. But when the wrenching agony of the flit ceased, and Colm’s body put itself back together, with the Shihoka around him like a second skin, he was not in that grove, wherever it was. He was floating in space, with vacuum prickling his hull.
Off to one side there was a star. Colm instinctively turned his back on it. He knew now what the Ghosts meant about being dazzled by stars. It was so bright it made it hard to see anything else at all. But he had a solution for that. He staggered forward to the cockpit and initiated a scan with the Shihoka’s instruments. They would not be blinded by the electrical charge that built up in a star’s corona.
Lloyd lurched into the cockpit. “Jesus, that was fucking awful. I need a fag.”
“I’m actually surprised you’re here at all,” Colm said. He had half-expected to leave his father sitting on the dirt in the back field.
“You must have some fags,” Lloyd said, poking into the lockers. “I can’t believe you came back from Japan with twenty boxes of chocolate and no cigarettes …”
“That’s what I don’t get, Dad. You’re sober …”
“Not by choice.”
“And you’ve not got a next-generation esthesia chip in your head.”
Lloyd smiled craftily. “No, but I’ve got something just as good. Here, Mickle, Mickle!”
Mickle padded into the cockpit. Colm wondered if it was Mickle, or a copy. No way to tell.
Lloyd scooped her up. “My familiar,” he said.
At the sight of his father petting the cat, old emotions surged up. Anger spilled out, like pus from a wound that had been festering for thirty-plus years. “Are you going to murder her, like you murdered Sprite?”
Lloyd suddenly sounded old. “Murder’s for people. You don’t murder a cat …”
“Are you denying you killed her? I found her flipping body in a box! You had her stuffed, like a trophy!”
“You were so upset, I thought having her stuffed would make you feel better. But then your mother explained what a fucking terrible idea it would be to give it to you. I’ve been more fortunate than I deserve, being married to Daisy.”
“That’s the truth anyway,” Colm said. He was white-knuckling the arms of his couch, blind to the screens in front of him. “But why, Dad? You loved Sprite, too! At least I thought you did.”
“I did,” Lloyd said heavily. “That’s what made the sacrifice work.”
“Huh?”
“Colm, your sister was very sick. I don’t know if you recall. It was when you were eight.”
“When Sprite died.”
“Aye. Bridget caught multiply resistant tuberculosis. It was one of those things, she picked it up on a routine doctor’s visit. After that I said no child of mine is going near a hospital again. But it was too late. They had no drugs they could give her. She was dying in front of our eyes. Your mother and myself were losing our minds, and I said all right. There may be one thing I can do. I heard about it from my father.” He shrugged. “It worked.”
Colm was silent for a minute. He hadn’t known Bridget had been that ill. There was so much you didn’t pick up on as a child. “She got better.”
“Yes.”
“It was after that your career started going downhill.”
“Yes.”
“You’d lost your familiar.”
“Yes.”
“Did Gramps do … animal sacrifice?”
“Yes. He was a black magician. Fortunately he was nae fucking good at it. He only managed to hurt and alienate everyone he knew. Your great-grandfather, the first Colm Mackenzie, who built the Free Church Manse, disowned him on account of it, which is why I hardly knew my own grandfather as a child.”
These revelations rocked Colm. Not knowing what to say, he turned his attention to the screens. The results of the scan were coming in.
“I swore I’d never be like my father,” Lloyd said. “No black magic for me. I only broke my rule that one time. Never again.” His voice turned harsh. “All the same, I blame myself. I wanted to pass on the good to you and not the bad, but I suppose it’s two sides of the same coin. So I taught you my tricks … and you went away to space and came back sacrificing human beings.”
Colm turned in his couch. Lloyd’s eyes were twin beams of searing judgement. Colm opened his mouth to deny it but then gave up. Of course Lloyd was right. Making copies, only to sacrifice them in battle? What else was that but human sacrifice? Kisperet had been drenched in black magic like a bandage drenched in blood. If it was all right, Colm’s conscience would not so insistently have told him it was wrong from the very start. The amazing thing was that Dhjerga, reared to black magic, steeped in it, had known it was wrong, too.
“I’ve given that shit up now,” he said. The composite imaging screen tugged at his attention. “Dad—”
“You’d better have,” Lloyd said. “We can’t defeat the Magus with black magic. It’s no good playing these bastards at their own game. They always win.”
“Dad, look at this.”
They seemed to be in orbit around Atletis. An extremely elliptical orbit. The Shihoka was now approaching apogee, 50,000 kilometers out.
“What’s that?” Lloyd said, pointing at the small, green-dappled moon.
“It’s …” Colm trailed off. “Not Atletis,” he muttered.
It looked the same, but there was no gas giant anywhere to be seen. The spectrum of the nearby star revealed it to be a dim red dwarf, not a G-type star like Kisperet’s. This little sun was much closer than Kisperet’s star. And most damningly, the ‘moon’s’ equatorial and polar orbits were chock-a-block with spacecraft and orbitals.
“It’s not a moon.” He remembered the alien machinery he’d found in the caverns of the Magus’s headquarters on Atletis. His suspicion that Atletis was an artificial body. “I think it’s a … heimdall.”
“What’s that when it’s at home?”
Colm zoomed in on the captured images of spacecraft in orbit. They did not resemble human or queazel spaceships. They looked like dead twigs. Lengths of dry brambles, with complicated axial symmetries.
Looking inward towards the star, dozens more power sources shone bright in the blackness. Looking outward, there were hundreds more power sources. Thousands. Yet he could see only a single, small, rocky planet in the system. It whipped around the dwarf star in a tight orbit that would take only seventy Earth days to complete.
“I think …” he said slowly. “I think this might be Elphame.”
CHAPTER 44
THE LIGHT WOKE DHJERGA UP.
Just one of the stained glass windows in the old building remained intact. The others were broken, boarded over. The surviving window depicted a man holding a fish in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other. The man wore a plain gold crown that seemed to float above his head. Dhjerga had puzzled over this figure in his half-conscious moments. Now the afternoon sun shone straight through the man, onto Dhjerga’s face, and he realized: Oh, of course, he’s wearing a crown of light.
He lay motionless in the bed they had made for him, which was stiff, slithery quilts on two benches pushed together. The crack between the benches ran down the center of his spine. When they gave him water he imagined it running through the crack and dripping onto the floor. A dead mage could not drink.
He sensed he was being watched. At first he thought it must be the man in the window who was watching him, but then he decided that was silly. He propped himself up on his elbows.
An old woman sat on another bench, staring at him, chin in cupped hands.
“What do you want?” Dhjerga said.
“I want you to get up.”
Dhjerga laughed. It surprised him that he was able to laugh. After all, he was dead. He lay down again.
She came and stood over him. She was haggard, her eyes bloodshot pits, her gray hair dragged back in a ponytail. A white plastic raincoat swathed her frail
form. She said, “Get up, you lazy bastard.”
“I’m dead,” Dhjerga told her. “Gaethla Moro laid his death curse on me.”
She grabbed his arm. She was uncommonly strong for a woman her age. She hoisted him stumbling over the ends of the benches. His knees crumpled under him, and he was like to fall on top of her, but another woman came up and caught his other arm. This one was younger with red hair. She said, “He’s in a bad way.”
“I’m in a bad way,” Dhjerga echoed. “In a bad way.” The death curse sat in his chest like a rusty nail, bleeding evil into his bloodstream.
“Cry me a freaking river,” said the younger woman, and the old one said, “I’ve lost my husband, my son, and the grandson I did not know I had, all in one day. Now tell me how you’re hurting.”
The two women dragged him up to the front of the church. There was a table there, which had a thing on it, an X made of sticks standing on one of its long ends. It balanced there without being propped up. This annoyed Dhjerga. He swiped clumsily at it, knocking it over. The red-haired woman muttered under her breath and swept out a hand, making the thing sway back to the vertical again.
“Hold him,” the old woman said.
There was another thing on the table: a bottle in the shape of a woman with a blue cloak. While the red-haired woman held Dhjerga upright, the old one uncapped the bottle. Fear suddenly took hold of him. He struggled. He was weak from days without food and almost water, but he was still a man and a soldier, and he gave the young woman enough difficulty that she shouted, “Sunita! Give us a hand!”
Another old woman, dark as soil, came in and helped her to hold him. Dhjerga thought fleetingly of his cousins on Kisperet: mages, healers, killers. He had learned early in life that one woman might be reasoned with but there was no use opposing a group of them. He gave up struggling. The dark woman said to the other old one, “Where did you get that?”
“I think it’s been here for the last hundred years. It’s from Lourdes.” The old woman came up to Dhjerga and tipped the woman-bottle over his forehead, while with her other hand she made a strange gesture, side to side and up and down. Water trickled into his eyes and mouth.
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