by Ken Altabef
“A beautiful, shinin’ woman in the sky. Imagine that. What a sight. She said she wanted me. She said she loved me. Hah-heh!”
“Sounds serious.”
“Hah! I’ve been around enough to know. Love is just another kind of slavery, squire. Not for me. Wrong man. And so I ran. Runnin’ away from the stars in the sky. Now that is crazy isn’t it?
“I ordered the foreyard and headsails played out. We put every scrap of tack on the wind. I pretended to’ve seen an enemy vessel with the glass. The men had no choice but to obey. A pirate captain has absolute authority while in combat. That’s the rule. No time for questions. But that wouldn’t last long, and I didn’t dare tell ‘em what I’d really seen.
“I ordered the cannons made ready. I’ve no clear recollection on exactly why I did that except maybe to keep a certain party of the men occupied, the more belligerent of the bunch. If I kept ’em busy unlashin’ the heavy tubes from the hull, haulin’ ’em into position and unpackin’ balls of heavy shot, they’d not have time to cause trouble.
“Meanwhile I kept on runnin’ the ship as hard as possible. That thing starin’ down at me from the sky. That woman. Callin’ after me. The crew started askin’ questions, as free sailors will, you know. Where were we headed all our sail square to the wind? What prize were we after?
“By then it was too late. I’d sailed the Hand into the throat of a gale. Every man who wasn’t clingin’ to the masts against the high winds went over the side. The wind tore the sails apart and sent the riggin’ crashin’ down on our heads. The ship climbed mountainous waves, rockin’ and heavin’ to the skies. That woman. She was tryin’ to take us. I wasn’t goin’ to let her.
“The men had had enough. What the hell was I doin’? It was madness. Fightin’ broke out on deck. In the end The Black Hand was battered apart by the storm. No beach or port in sight. Only four men survived the wreck. We’d run aground on the reef. We four of us crawled to the top of that wind-torn rock.”
“But when the merchant vessel arrived, you were the only one there. What became of the others?”
“I killed ’em I suppose.”
“You don’t know?”
Ketch shrugged. “My hands were already covered with blood.”
“You really saw this thing?”
“It was real. I saw it.”
“You don’t normally go crazy and kill all your men?”
“First time. I feel real bad about it too. Most nights I wake two or three times before dawn, feelin’ The Black Hand hit the reef, the smell of all that coffee pourin’ into the sea, hearin’ the keel crack beneath me like a scream in the night.”
“That settles it,” said Eric. “I was wrong.”
Ketch smiled. “See? Not such a bad sort when you get to know me, eh?”
“Not about you. About her. About everything. Damn!”
Now it was time to go. Eric didn’t know exactly what he was going to do, what he could still do. One thing was certain—he had to find Theodora.
He found one of his men slumped on the floor outside the holding cell.
“You didn’t?”
“I didn’t,” said Ketch. “Just a wee knock on the head, squire. He’ll wake up in an hour or two, right as rain.”
Chapter 47
It’s coming. Theodora stood in the open field behind the granary. The white picket fence had been trampled and the carousel lay in a jumbled heap upon the ground, its iron beams removed to a safe distance. The gaily painted horse heads glanced sideways up at her from the grassy plain. All whimsy had gone from their carven faces. They were dead wood. It all seemed an ample metaphor for what had become of her marriage, her life.
Trask stood beside her, gazing down at the lens in his hand. Meadowlark and several of the ‘cousins’ milled about under the watchful gaze of a few of Eric’s men. She had urged the faeries to maintain their mortal disguises so the men wouldn’t cause them any trouble. They could ill afford a riot now, when they were so close to the end.
What she would do with the faery folk after this deed was done, she could hardly guess. She couldn’t think that far ahead. The outcome of the task before them was still very much in doubt. Its chances of success resided almost entirely in the shaky hands of Trask.
“I don’t understand the mechanism,” he said. “There are a few tiny gears but they don’t seem connected to anything at all. This is not a practical device.”
“It focuses the moonlight,” she returned. “That’s really all I know. And yet, I feel its power from here. Don’t you?”
He looked down into his hand again. “There is a slight tingling sensation. Is that what you mean? Is it electrical in some way?”
“Stop trying to understand it. Just aim it at the monster when it comes.”
“That’s about all I can do.”
“Fine.”
The sky was ablaze with shooting stars. Vague ribbons of green and yellow writhed across the night’s darkness, resembling the wondrous light show that sometimes occurred in the skies of northern England, the so-called northern lights. The moon seemed the only outpost of normalcy in the wild turmoil above. But it was only a half moon with a wrap of dark clouds misting over. Was it going to be enough, she wondered? There were too many things she didn’t know.
“She’s coming! She’s coming!” shouted Meadowlark. His arms outstretched, he spun gaily about in a circle. “Won’t it be lovely? Won’t it be grand?”
“We’re here to try and stop it,” Theodora reminded him.
“Oh yes, of course. I knew that.”
Theodora felt it too. And it was not an entirely terrible feeling, either. The thing’s approach stirred a peculiar excitement in her belly, a feeling that she was coming home after a long journey. That she was soon to be reunited with loved ones, all wounds set to rights, all questions answered.
And then, with a tremendous thunderclap, the sky folded over.
“She’s here!” screamed Meadowlark. He put his hands to his ears as if to blot out an unwanted conversation. His eyes rolled in their sockets. He shook his head violently, making crazy noises. Smiling, crying, singing half a line of every song he’d ever known, all at once.
Theodora held her ground. She felt a bitter taste in her mouth. This was no grand homecoming. It’s a lie. It’s all a trick.
The sky tore open and something bright and fluid spilled in from the other side, like a river of stars. A million dots of light flashing on and off in a random pattern, each demanding to be heard. A seething mass of white noise bubbling in the sky.
“She’s here!” cried Meadowlark. “Do you feel it? This is our destiny.”
“What do you feel?” she asked Trask.
He didn’t answer. He stared at the sky, his body wracked by an enormous apoplectic fit. His head and arms shook with the convulsion, a pink foam bubbling from his lips. His legs trembled so wildly they looked like they would give out at any second.
“Trask!”
He held the lens up. “I’ve got it.”
The seething menace filled half the sky. Though bright enough to sting her eyes, its sparkling effect shed no light on the field below. Theodora and the others remained in darkness.
A hissing sound, like that of a million insects scurrying across each other, filled Theodora’s ears. The people in the field were all convulsing now, the faeries shifting form uncontrollably, sprouting wings and branches and fronds of leaves, strange woody appendages appearing one moment and gone the next. Most of the human men had bent over double, vomiting and shaking. A chill walked down Theodora’s spine. This was a hundred times worse than she’d imagined. She stood in the presence of a force of nature that might possibly have been bested by gods of old, but a few faeries and men alone in a field could never hope to deny this monster its due.
Meadowlark screamed, rolling across the meadow as if he were on fire.
“Trask!” she said. Her voice was only a whisper. “Use it! Use it now. Before she…before… If she speaks
to me, I’ll be lost forever.”
Theodora felt her insides go loose and cold as if she were nothing more than a bag of freezing water.
“Use it!”
Her voice cracked midsentence and she broke off trying. The blazing static spread across the sky. Theodora felt her soul being sucked out of her body just like before. But Amalric had given her only a taste of the Chrysalid’s power. The seething sky called to her, deep inside. It would have her.
Theodora kept searching the indistinct mass, looking for its eyes and mouth. It must have eyes, she thought. Her mind couldn’t process what she was seeing. Oh no, she realized. It’s ALL eyes. A million, million eyes.
Trask fell to his knees, the lens still held high in a quivering hand. “I…I’m trying… I can’t… nothing’s happening.”
The monster spoke. Its voice had a bizarre cadence like a cross between a shriek of horror and the purr of a crocodile.
It said: “Dance, children! Dance! All my sons and daughters, waiting for me. Your wait is ended. All my little saplings. You shall taste sweet oblivion! Sweet, sweet oblivion.”
“I can’t…” Trask crumpled to the ground. The Silvered Lens fell at Theodora’s feet.
She caught her own reflection in the mirrored thread within the lens. Silver is faery metal and always shows faeries true, regardless of their glamour. So she expected to see her real face reflected there. The faery visage of Clarimonde. But that’s not what she saw. She saw a human face. She saw Theodora Grayson.
What a fool I’ve been, she thought. The lens is only part of the weapon. It’s the man too, not just the lens. The bloodline. We need a Grayson.
Chapter 48
It’s a perfect day for a picnic. The sky is blue and cloudless overhead like a perfect chalkboard with puffy white clouds chalked on. A gentle breeze coming off the lake brings the green smells of summer. Mother has just spread their lunch across the blanket and then it begins to rain. Nora yelps. The rain is hot and stings her skin.
The sound of the rain is a mild buzzing, like an angry hornet’s nest, very far away, but getting closer.
James rushes to help Mother pack up the plates but the rain keeps pelting down, too hot, scalding now, as each drop splashes red welts across his skin. They run for the barn. And then everything seems like it’s going to be all right for a moment, safe beneath the slatted roof, but then there comes the buzzing again and the swarm of bees, horrible bees, is inside of the barn and they buzz and fly about, glistening with every color in the rainbow, their strange multifaceted eyes staring, their antennae waggling as they swarm over him. They don’t sting, they just buzz and crawl and nuzzle, but he knows they are going to sting. They are going to sting him all at once and it is going to hurt real bad…
James woke up. Still breathing heavily, he flung off the blanket as if it were a clinging wrap of rainbow bees. He couldn’t be sure he was truly awake. The room was washed in strange multicolored light and the buzzing was still there.
“James?” asked his sister. She too was sitting up in bed with a frightened and pale look on her face. He didn’t have to ask. He knew she’d been having the same nightmare. They both turned toward the window. A gauzy white curtain hung across the open pane, billowing slightly from the breeze. Strange multicolored lights played across the fine linen, sending images into the room to dance off the walls. The whole thing resembled a light-box James had seen once at Earl Billingsly’s house, but these images weren’t the usual horses and parade animals. They were a strange sort of chaos.
“James, what’s happening?” Nora seemed terribly frightened.
He felt scared too, but he was two years older—well, nineteen months older, anyway—and he was the boy so it was his duty to go and see. He stepped lightly out of bed, his legs still shaky from the dream, as he approached the window. The buzzing was getting worse, almost painful now as it rose and fell, rose and fell again. He pulled the curtain aside, half expecting a tidal wave of bees to come streaming into the room.
Nora screamed.
James stepped back, gripping the curtain so tightly he tore the panel.
The color of the sky was all wrong, and it was broken. There was a tear in the night sky. A jagged hole, spilling bright light! And on the other side was something impossible. It seethed with bizarre colors that flowed in various different directions at once, like melting wax—and it was made of eyes, all different sizes and colors but most definitely alive with intelligence. The eyes shot beams of emotion at them. Curiosity, anger, betrayal, and love.
“Children!” it said. “My dear children!”
Nora screamed again.
Just then, Nanny Lucinda came rushing into their bedroom. She started to ask what was the matter but stopped mid-sentence.
“Get away! Get away from the window!”
James backed slowly away as she sped past him. When she got a good look outside, her head jerked back so sharply it sent her linen cap flying off. “The blights! Oh Lord preserve us from these dirty scheming nixies.” She tried to pull the torn curtain shut but she was in such a state she botched the whole thing, hands shaking, whole body shaking too, and pulled it down from the rings. The gauzy linen panels flopped over her. She brushed them off in a panic as if they were a horde of stinging bees. And when she turned back to the children she screamed!
The look in Nanny’s eyes startled James. It was as if she was horrified of him. But that couldn’t be. He didn’t understand.
Then he saw Nora. Her skin was green, her hair a dark scraggly seaweed atop her head—no longer concerned with gravity, it fluttered about, framing her face in wild, changing shapes. Her ears had points on them. She didn’t notice him looking. She was instead staring at her hands, at the green skin on her arms. When she looked over at him, her eyes were startling as well. They were like diamonds.
“James!” she said.
He looked down at his own hands and they were such a dark blue, almost purple, his fingernails black and sharp and curled like a bear’s claws. He touched his cheek and his skin felt hard and grained like wood. And he felt different too. Everything was different. He felt hungry like never before and not just for food. He wondered how plants grew, transforming dirt into corn and wheat, or how a dragonfly could stay aloft on such fragile wings. He felt angry and betrayed. And loved. And hated…
The blights, was all he could think. Nanny saying the blights. The blights!
“Nanny!” She had swooned and fallen to the floor.
“Children!” came the voice from the window, from the naked sky.
“Mother?” asked Nora.
“No,” said James. “That’s not right.”
But there was nothing else to do. They went to the window. The people in the field below were pointing at the sky and shouting.
“Is that Mum down there, in the center?” Nora asked.
“No.” He pointed to the raging sky. “I think… that’s our mother. There.”
Chapter 49
“Bloody hell!” shouted Ketch. He stopped dead and stood looking up at the sky. Eric witnessed something few men had ever seen before—an expression of stark, staring fear torturing Draven Ketch’s face.
Eric emerged from the doorway, pushed past him and saw it for himself. The night-time world had gone mad. Ribbons of misty colored light, stars falling like rain, and amid it all a bubbling, seething horror.
“She followed me!” Ketch’s statement was punctuated by an assortment of screams carried on the night air from the direction of the granary.
“We’ve got to get back inside,” urged the pirate. “The cellar is the best place. The only place. The walls are thick. Thick enough, I think.”
Eric tore Ketch’s hand from his elbow. “Fine. If you don’t have the stomach for a fight—”
“Fight? What fight?” Ketch stabbed a pointed finger at the weeping sky. “Never take on a fight you can’t win. That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s not crazy. It’s something I have to do.”
With that, he ran back into the house. Probably the first time, Eric thought, that man had ever run into a holding cell.
Eric took off at a jog in the opposite direction. Those screams sounded as if they were coming from the field behind the granary.
He arrived at the field to find the carousel destroyed, an assortment of shapeshifting faeries leaping and dancing madly among the wreckage and a handful of his men transforming into faeries before his very eyes. Trask lay in a heap on the ground. Theodora stood above him, alone in the center of the maelstrom.
She was in her faery form, her true form. It struck him that this was the first time he’d ever seen her by moonlight. Really seen her. The silver light played on her hair like a gauzy mist, her skin shone, her eyes sparkled.
She was truly beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
When she saw him, half the worry went out of her face. “Tell it to her,” she replied, pointing upward.
“Damn right I will.”
He could already sense the presence of the lens where it lay still clutched in Trask’s hand.
Eric took it up. He didn’t need to know how it worked. He could hear it buzzing in his ears, feel the warmth of the power concentrated within the scarlet circle of glass. It wanted to get out.
He aimed the lens at the sky.
At that moment he felt nothing but red, raw anger. Anger at everything that had happened. Everything, going all the way back to his grandfather Griffin Grayson. His stupid feud with the faeries, the tide of blood that had been spilled on both sides, all the senseless pain and suffering caused by the Gray Rot. The faery folk cowering underground, his own people shuddering in their beds at night. All of it.
A dark crimson beam shot from the lens and tore its way up into the sky.
The stars screamed. A surreal cry of anguish rained down on the meadow as the beam struck. It was as deep and loud as the thunderous roar of some primal beast, some dragon of old. It was a sound from some other realm, so strange and alien, it had no place here.
