“So I started to explore the stars. Living longer than any other mage, I had developed my art to a high degree. I learned how to search for new power sources among the stars, and flit to them. I learned that there were many, many worlds, and some of them were good for human habitation. And I made up my mind. We would flee. The faeries would never know where we had gone. I chose a world, a good world, and enlisted all the druids and mages in my secret plan.”
Drest broke in. “Why didn’t you come back to Earth? Why didn’t you come back for me?”
The Magus said gruffly, “I did come back for you … much later. I had to wait until I was strong enough to win. At that time there were only a few of us, and all we had was swords and spears.”
Colm, breathless with curiosity, said, “How did you discover bolt-action rifles and mortars?”
“I am telling it,” the Magus said. “We combined our strength and we moved Faerieland.”
“So that’s where the heimdall went!”
“We flitted and we took the whole world with us. It was a heroic feat, but tinged with bitterness, because many of our friends and relatives were changed by the journey, and when they came back to themselves they were not quite the same.”
Lloyd swore. “The corpsicles you left behind are probably still floating in the asteroid belt.”
“We did what we had to do,” the Magus said. “When we got to our new sun, we set upon the faeries, who were confused by the journey, and slew them all. Then we were the masters of Faerieland. We renamed it, after an old legend of Rome: Atletis. And we set out to colonize the new world I had found, which Atletis now orbits like a moon. I named that one: Kisperet.”
Dhjerga rubbed his mouth with his knuckles. This had to be devastating for him, Colm thought. He was hearing the history of his own people, in all its glory and sadness. He said, “That’s why Kisperet lost its water. You can’t just put a moon in orbit around a planet and expect nothing to change. It must have disrupted everything.”
“But for many centuries we lived well,” the Magus said. “There was only one problem. We had fled so far, and hidden ourselves so well, that I could not find my way back. I spent those centuries searching the stars, looking for Earth. It was a weary time. At long last my quest came to an end. I found Earth … in the midst of a terrible war.” He glanced at Colm. “That is how we discovered guns.”
“First World War,” Colm muttered. “Or maybe the Crimea?”
“I realized then that the Romans had won. Earth was now hostile to us. So I returned home, and I set about building my people into a war engine to match the Romans’ might. That, too, took generations. By the time I was finally ready to strike, you had spread your empire to other worlds as well. We would have a fight on our hands.”
Suddenly, the Magus laughed.
“But as it turned out, it was easy. Your faerie machines were no match for my Mage Corps. We rolled you up in just a few years.”
Colm repressed a scowl. It was sadly true. He said, “But had you forgotten about the faeries? Did you think they would let you have Earth for the taking?”
“They said they would,” the Magus answered. “I held talks with them on Ross 458c, after we conquered that world, and we signed a peace treaty. They promised that they would not help you oppose us.”
“The bastards,” Colm snarled. Nicky stirred on his knee. “Shush, shush.” He had to get Nicky home. Meg and Daisy must be going out of their minds.
But Lloyd wasn’t done with the Magus. “When they held those so-called peace talks with you, the Gray Emperor had already initiated the extinction protocol. Their promise was meaningless.”
“The emperor spoke of black holes,” the Magus said. “What is a black hole, if you would be so kind?”
There was a moment of silence. Colm cleared his throat. He pointed up at the sky. “That’s going to be one.”
“That is a star,” the Magus said.
“Yes … But I commanded all my Walking Guns to fly into it when they finished with the heimdalls. Each Gun has a black hole in its guts. So, er, long story short, that star’s going to collapse.”
“Poetic justice,” Lloyd said, clapping him on the back.
Dhjerga said, “How long will it take?”
“I’ve got no idea, to be honest. Could be a few days, could be centuries ...”
The Magus nodded. “Then Drest and I will remain here until it dies.”
Colm met the huge druid’s eyes, shocked.
“Drest cannot flit,” the Magus rumbled. Colm caught his breath. The Magus knew Drest was a copy. Yet he was prepared to sacrifice for him as if he was his real son. “And I will not leave him behind. Not again.”
He rose and gestured to the horizon.
“This is another Faerieland, I think: an unfinished one. They have not put in the plants and animals yet. So I will put in our plants and animals. I will make a world just for us.”
“I thought it was impossible to fetch plants,” Colm muttered.
“Not for me,” the Magus said. “I am a real mage.”
Colm smiled, acknowledging it.
Drest was paddling in the little waves, letting the water lift up the weight of his body. Suddenly a dolphin-like alien broke the surface. This heimdall was not completely uninhabited after all. The creature whistled and nosed up to Drest. It did not seem to be threatening, just curious. Delight radiated from Drest’s face. “Dad!” he called out. “You really have brought me to Faerieland!”
CHAPTER 56
“WELP, NOW IT’S JUST us,” Meg said to Axel.
The Ghosts were gone. Only Meg and Axel remained in the clammy tunnel behind Nessie’s lair. Oh, and the monster Drest. He was sitting on the floor, sucking his fingers and weeping.
Out of sheer habit, Meg tried to think about how they could survive. “We could eat the food Nessie made for Drest,” she said. “Catch fish. Run the TDP plant. Drink water from the lake …”
But that would only postpone their death, and frankly, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to postpone it. Nicky was gone. There was no point to living any longer. She wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her cheek on her knee, detaching from her own body, from her pain, from everything, floating in an interior void of numbness.
Axel touched her arm. She looked up. He was kneeling in front of her. “There has to be another way out.”
“Just shut up, Axel.”
“The air’s fresh. It has to be circulating.”
“I said shut up.”
“Drest got in here somehow, didn’t he?”
“Leave me alone.”
“No.” He tried to pry her arms loose from around her knees.
She shouted into his face, “Nicky is dead!”
“We don’t know that,” he said feebly.
“People die.” She was thinking of her mother and father now. “It’s a fact of life. Pretending it didn’t happen, pretending he might come back, pretending it might work out all right … that’s just weakness. Weakness!”
Axel said doggedly, “Even if he is … gone … we can’t just lie down and give up.”
“It’s all right for you! He wasn’t your son!”
Axel flinched as if she’d hit him. He stood up, turned away, and punched the wall. “Ow. Shit.” He punched the wall again. It was freaking granite. Blood welled from his knuckles. “Oh damn it, dammit,” he shouted, and hauled back to punch the wall again, because he couldn’t punch her, because he wanted to punch her, he must want to, but he was better than that. He lived the virtues she had always admired—honor, justice, and all that good stuff. And she’d repaid him by hitting him where it hurt.
She jumped up and caught his arms.
“Leave me alone,” he said, echoing her words.
“I’m sorry, Axel. I’m sorry.”
“He was mine. I loved him as much as you did.”
“I know.” She remembered how Axel had been the one who looked after Nicky when he was a newborn, rocking him and
feeding him and changing him and … loving him. The memories cracked her detachment. Tears came.
“We have to keep going, Meg.” He was crying too, holding her. “We owe it to him not to give up.”
“I don’t know how you figure that.” She felt as limp as a soggy paper napkin. All the dead people she had carried around with her, a conga line of ghosts constantly urging her to fight, seemed to be washing away with her tears, leaving her empty.
“Ow. My damn hand. I’m so stupid … There must be a way out. Dryjon and Diejen said they got in through a cave …”
Drest spoke up, shyly. “I think …” Both of them had forgotten about the man-mountain, sitting by himself, almost out of reach of the star fungi light. They whipped around to stare at him. “I think they came through my room.”
“They did?” Axel said.
“I heard them come down the back stairs. I was frightened. I hid.”
“Back stairs?” Meg yelped.
They hurried down the corridor together and stepped between the bars of the Nessie gate. It was a tight squeeze for Drest. Axel shone his headlamp around. Drest’s room was completely barren, with only a pile of ancient blankets in one corner for a bed. A hole in one corner served as a toilet, but it seemed to have long since backed up. Drest had tidied his excrement into a neat mound and covered it with another blanket—a heartbreaking attempt at housekeeping. Meg’s eyes overflowed again. Now that she had started crying, it felt like she would never stop.
“Here are the stairs,” Drest said.
The back of the cave narrowed into a tunnel with a deeply corrugated floor, which led up at a steep angle. Drest had to squeeze through sideways.
“I have not come this way in a long time,” he muttered.
The stairs led to a maze of echoing corridors and rooms, all empty. This had been a spacious sentrienza mound, no doubt housing dozens of aliens in its day. Drest said he had never explored any further than this—the sentrienza had not allowed him up here, and he had not challenged the prohibition after they left. Meg and Axel had to persuade him at gunpoint not to return to his wretched cave. Towing the poor immortal, they climbed up, and higher up, until they reached the mother of all tunnels, wide enough for ten men to walk abreast. By now Meg and Axel were about ready to pass out from exhaustion and thirst. They stumbled onward and upwards, stopping frequently to rest.
“Keep going,” Axel muttered, when Meg felt like she could not get up again. “Keep going.”
“Disable your damn implant,” she said, “before I punch you for being so gung-ho.” The rock was cold under her cheek. She saw Drest crawl past, the rolls of his torso dragging on the ground.
“It is disabled.”
“It is?”
“Yup. I’m done with it for good this time.”
“So this is who you really are,” she said, mustering a smile. Nothing more needed to be said. She got up, and jerked her chin at Drest, who was now ahead of them. “Well, look at that. He’s freaking crawling, and he’s going to beat us to the finish line ...”
They covered the last yards of the tunnel in a walking-speed race, and wound up in a dead end. There had been a cave-in.
“Oh, hell,” Axel sighed.
“No!” Meg said. “Look! I can see daylight!”
She scrambled up the rocks. There was a gap between two of the largest boulders. Wet, cold wind blew on her face. She thrust her head and shoulders out into the shelter of a craggy overhang. She was looking down through veils of rain, across neglected fields, to the roofs of Drumnadrochit.
She stayed there a moment, breathing the heady fresh air, and then jumped back down to the floor of the tunnel. “That must be how Dryjon and Diejen got in.” The chink was wide enough for her, or the skinny-ass Dryjon, or even Axel at a squeeze. It was not by any stretch of the imagination wide enough for Drest.
“I will stay here,” Drest muttered.
Meg took a deep breath. “No. You will not.”
“I cannot die.”
No, but what would happen to him without the Loch Ness Monster to look after him? She met Axel’s eyes. He nodded. They had to take responsibility for the consequences of killing Nessie, and that meant not leaving Drest behind.
They both scrambled up and heaved on the car-sized rock that was blocking the gap. It did not move a fraction. Too heavy.
“OK,” Meg said. “Get out of the way.”
Bracing her feet, she inhaled.
Exhale.
Inhale.
She raised her right hand, her prosthetic one. That strange tingling feeling had never quite gone away. As she concentrated, it intensified.
With a piercing ki-ai shout, she let gravity drop the edge of her hand down on the rock.
It split down the middle. One half fell between Meg and Axel into the tunnel, and the other fell out and went thumping away, end over end, down the hillside.
Meg tumbled out after it, onto wet green grass.
CHAPTER 57
THE SUN WAS SETTING over the vineyard on the hill behind the Free Church Manse as Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth’s guests rolled up in their cars and horse-drawn carts. It was perfectly safe to use electrically powered equipment these days, but the Ghosts preferred the technology they knew. And with the grid still down, four-legged transport was simply more practical. Gil perched on the roof of the old church, watching Morag Wilson and her boyfriend, Kalsp, unhitch the horses and lead them into the back field. Kalsp was a good lad. He’d won the approval of even the gimlet-eyed Bridget by teaching the islanders how to slaughter pigs and preserve the meat, in a world without refrigerators. Hard to believe that he, like all the Ghosts, had begun his existence on Earth by slaughtering human beings.
They were so gentle. Brothers Mark, Cassius, Julian, and Bertram—all of them Ghosts—greeted the guests warmly and guided them beneath Gil’s perch, through the doors of the old church.
When everyone was inside, Gil scurried down the drainpipe, bringing a couple of broken tiles down with him. Brother Mark met him at the door. “Have you been climbing on the roof again, sir?” he smiled. “You’re all mucky.”
Gil glanced down at his official vest. The white “I Heart Skye” emblem—hand-embroidered, messily, by little Scarlett Wilson—was indeed stained green from the moss that grew through the tiles on the church roof.
“The roof needs mending,” Gil informed the young monk haughtily. “You should take care of that before winter comes.”
“On it, sir. We’re already prototyping tiles at the kiln in Portree.”
The Ghosts approached the mundane tasks of survival—everything from mending roofs to salting pork to breeding horses—with the same fanatical completism that they had once applied to mass murder. They had taught the islanders many crafts that the people of Earth had forgotten, providing guidance while humbly seeming to follow rather than lead. They may have come back to themselves, but in their hearts, Gil thought with a tinge of cynicism, they were still slaves.
That may be why they made such good monks.
One whole side of the church was occupied with Ghosts who had taken monastic orders, embracing Christianity and the promise of atonement that it offered, under the direction of a rather overwhelmed Roman Catholic priest from Glasgow. This fellow, Father Campbell, now appeared suddenly at the front of the church, vestments still wet from wherever he had been last. He twitched his chasuble straight and flung out his arms as if to embrace his whole Skye flock, who leapt to their feet, roaring a rather martial-sounding welcome.
“Did he manage it by himself this time?” Gil said to Diejen Lizp, who had appeared beside him at the same moment.
“No,” she said. “I had to bring him. None of them can do it by themselves. They are worse than children.”
Few human clerics had survived the invasion. Strangely enough, those that had almost all turned out to be mages. The genetic mutation for magic was more widespread than the CHEMICAL MAGE conspirators’ data trawl had uncovered. But none of these �
�mages’ actually knew how to work magic.
Gil had brought a few of the esthesia implants designed for CHEMICAL MAGE with him from the Betelgeuse system. He had offered them to the Priest Corps, but they’d all turned them down. Wisely, in Gil’s opinion. They had all heard the story of what happened to Colm Mackenzie—his drug addiction, his slide down the slippery slope to black magic, and the way he’d disappeared over and over again, until he disappeared for the last time.
Lloyd Mackenzie had disappeared, too, even though he did not have an implant. That was an interesting mystery that Gil sometimes mulled in his private hours.
But it made him sad to think about Lloyd and Colm, and this was supposed to be a happy occasion.
He turned to Diejen Lizp. Her brother, Dhjerga, had disappeared, too. They had an unspoken pact not to mention it. Her hair and jacket were wet. “Where have you blown in from this time?”
“France. The weather was foul. There were too many ordinands to fit in the church, so what does this mad priest do? Postpone the ceremony until the weather improves? No, he holds it outside in the pouring rain.”
“I wonder if holy orders would be so popular with the Ghosts,” Gil muttered, “if there were enough girls to go around.”
Diejen pretended to slap him. “Whatever works,” she said. “Peace is better than war.” Then she peered at him. “You are not thinking of taking holy orders, are you?”
“Absolutely not!” Gil said. “And now I must join the important people.” He waved a foreleg at the raised sanctuary area, where the leading citizens of Skye were seated on handmade wooden benches. This was not a religious occasion; they were merely using the church. Father Campbell waved his arms, orchestrating the group of monks and locals who were rolling a large wooden cask up the aisle.
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