by Rod Rees
‘The SS? Why would the SS have an interest in Terror Incognita?’
‘Having been cut off from the outside world for two Seasons, Father,’ Trixie explained, ‘you’ll be unaware that an artefact known as the Column of Loci has been discovered. The engravings covering the Column have allowed us to decipher the Flagellum Hominum, which tells us that the Great Pyramid has a significant role to play in who emerges triumphant in the Demi-Monde … who is to be the victor in the final battle between good and evil that is Ragnarok.’
‘You’ve lost me, Trixie.’
‘The Flagellum Hominum says that:
Last comes the Time of Trysting
When those who would rule must vie
Joined in their final ferocity
The prize so precious, so profound.
Who will wield the staff of ABBA?
Who will place it atop the Pyramid?
For the victor the spoils of life
For the vanquished the lament of death
Such is the Way.
The Column is the “staff of ABBA”, which, despite our best efforts, is now in the hands of Aleister Crowley, who is intent on placing it on the summit of the Great Pyramid. My aim is to stop him.’
‘Perhaps that’s why I and my men have been awakened?’
‘A sensible assumption, Father. ABBA obviously thinks I’m going to need all the help I can get.’
Dashwood nodded, then pointed to the line of trees that bordered the beach. ‘I will do all I can in that regard, Trixie. And as you might have noticed, it isn’t just somewhat aged army officers like me who have been resuscitated by your presence, but also the fauna of this strange land.’
Trixie looked to where her father was pointing and sure enough, sitting in one of the tall oaks was a multicoloured bird. It was then that she realised that the forest was resonating with the sounds of birds and insects. Terror Incognita had come alive.
‘After a thousand years of denying any living thing access to this strange realm, it seems ABBA has now lifted His embargo,’ mused Dashwood. ‘Another sign that Ragnarok approaches, perhaps? But I’m forgetting my manners. My men are setting up a base in a clearing in the woods just a hundred or so yards away and I’m sure there’ll be a welcoming glass of Solution waiting for us there. We’ll all be interested to learn what’s been happening in the world since we’ve been slumbering here. Shall we go?’
*
It took almost an hour for Trixie to bring her father and his officers up to date on current affairs, and when she had finished they were quiet for several minutes as they assimilated the bad news. Finally her father looked up from warming his hands against the campfire and shook his head in wonderment. ‘Let me see if I can summarise the situation correctly. Crowley has taken this Column from you and will be aiming to mount it atop the Great Pyramid. The understanding you have is that if he’s able to do that then it’s all up for the Demi-Monde. So the question is: what to do to discomfort Mr Aleister Crowley?’
‘We have to take back the Column,’ answered Trixie.
‘Easier said than done, I think.’ Dashwood turned to David Crockett sitting next to him. ‘What do you think, Captain?’
Crockett edged closer to the fire. ‘I’ve had a lookout climb that tree yonder’ – here he pointed in the direction of a tall pine tree just to the north of the clearing they were sitting in – ‘and he reports a bustle of activity on the eastern shore, the one nearest to the Pyramid. By his reckoning, a couple of thousands of them SS bastards have landed there, all armed to the teeth and brimming with bile and devilment.’
‘How many fighters do you have with you, Trixie?’ her father asked.
Trixie glanced over to Wysochi, who gave a shrug before replying. ‘Counting in the sailors who manned the Wu, by my figuring … a couple of hundred, though ammunition is pretty low.’
‘That seems to rule out an attack,’ mused Dashwood.
‘I never intended to fight them toe to toe,’ said Trixie quietly. ‘A frontal attack would be suicide but two hundred determined fighters can do a lot of damage simply harassing a larger army. My plan is to fight Crowley guerrilla-style … to delay him raising the Column.’
‘That’s going to be difficult, Trixie. Terror Incognita is only nine miles across and the only cover is provided by the forest that borders the shoreline and clumps around Mare Incognitum. The rest of the place is bare, which means there’s nowhere much to hide. And once Crowley knows we’re here …’
‘It might be best to make a reconnaissance before making a decision about tactics, Colonel,’ observed Wysochi. ‘Better the devil you know and all that.’
Trixie rose to her feet and brushed the dust from the backside of her trousers. ‘You’re right, Wysochi. Get half a dozen fighters together and let’s go see what Crowley’s up to.’
*
Comrade Engineering Captain Andrew Roberts didn’t like Terror Incognita. It was a spooky place that gave him the jumps, especially now all the birds and insects had suddenly decided to sound off. Fortunately for him, the engineering challenge associated with landing the pontoon containing the Column hadn’t left him much time to dwell on its spookiness. Beaching three hundred tons of recalcitrant pontoon and then dragging it fifty yards inland – uphill, at that – had been a bitch of a task, a task that had required two steamers, fifty mules, five hundred men and much cursing and swearing to accomplish.
A tired and dirty Captain Roberts reported to General Clement, ‘The Column is safely secured at the landing site, Comrade General.’ He tried to disguise the waver in his voice. Clement scared the shit out of him: the man was a fury of nervous energy and mad as a box of bolts. He radiated evil and immediately he entered a room – or a tent in this case – the heat seemed to drain out of the place. Roberts shivered, but it had nothing to do with the autumnal winds that were blowing around the encampment.
‘But?’
‘But what, sir?’
‘There’s always a “but”, Roberts. You pioneer-types never say anything straight.’
‘Then I should advise you, sir, that as the Pyramid is over two miles inland, getting the Column there is going be one Hel of a job.’ Roberts pointed through the flap of the tent to the top of the Pyramid that poked out above the trees surrounding the beach. ‘It’s two miles blocked by trees and scrub, sir. I think we’ll need a lot more steamers and men to help clear a path and build a railway.’
Archie Clement gave an absent-minded nod and then took a reflective chew on his tobacco. ‘And if ah git you them steamers and such, how long is it gonna take afore that Column is on top of the Pyramid?’
The engineer scratched his chin. ‘Well, sir, the good news is that test bores indicate that Terror Incognita is free of nanoBites clear down to the Mantle so there isn’t anything stopping us laying a railway line. Say two months to clear the route and another couple to lay the line.’ He gave Clement what he hoped was a confident smile. ‘By my estimation, four months will see us alongside the Pyramid …’ His explanation trailed off: getting alongside the Pyramid was the easy bit, getting the Column on top of it would be a much more difficult stunt to pull off.
Clement shook his head. ‘We ain’t got four months, Captain. By the fiftieth day of Fall that Column has gotta be alongside the Pyramid and by the end of Fall sitting pretty atop of it. We gotta do that and make sure there’s space around the Pyramid for the six million folks His Holiness, Aleister Crowley, is fixing to invite to his Ceremony of Purification shindig.’ He spat out the gob of tobacco he’d been chomping on. ‘Them’s the orders of Great Leader Heydrich himself. You understanding what ah’m a-saying, Comrade Captain?’
Roberts gave a nod. If the Great Leader ordered it, then it had better be done. ‘Fiftieth day of Fall, you say, Comrade General? That’s a mighty stiff task if you don’t mind me saying so, and to do that I’m going to need a lot of extra help.’
‘Tell me what you need, Captain, an’ ah’ll git it, just don’t come back at
me with excuses. Ah ain’t in the market for excuses, ah’m in the market for solutions.’ And to emphasise the point, he took a swig from his silver hip flask.
Roberts gave the general a nervous glance. ‘There are rumours that rebel forces have landed on Terror Incognita, General. If they get frisky they could put a wrinkle in our schedule.’
‘Don’t you go fretting your head ’bout no Rebs, Captain. Them’s for the likes of me to worry ’bout. You just keep your eye on the ball ’cos that’s the way you’re gonna be sure that you hang on to the pair you already got.’
*
‘What do you think, Wysochi?’ whispered Trixie as they hid behind a bush just fifty yards from the beached pontoon.
‘We’ve got ourselves a real problem, Colonel. Way I see it, the SS are building themselves a fort and if the UnFunnies are putting down roots that tells me that it won’t be long before there’s a whole lot more of the bastards.’
‘So we attack now?’
‘I don’t think we’ve got much of an option: we’ve got to hit ’em before they’ve a chance to get their feet under the table. Once the UnFunnies get dug in, winkling the bastards out is going to take more than a couple of hundred fighters who are low on ammunition. My advice, Colonel, is that it’s now or never.’
Trixie used her telescope to make a final survey of the scene and what she saw wasn’t terribly encouraging. The area around the pontoon was a hive of activity with navvies felling trees and then dragging the trunks over to a clearing Clement had commandeered, using them to build palisades. At the rate they were going up it wouldn’t be long before they were snug behind ten-foot-high walls built out of thick pine, and these, plus the pits they were digging for their Gatling guns, would mean that any attack would be made against a well-fortified position and in the teeth of enfilading fire. A daunting prospect. Wysochi was right: she had to move against them now.
‘I concur, Major. In a week there might be five or six thousand more of the bastards and a damn sight more steamers. What we have to do is capture the pontoon, drag it back to the Wheel River and then blast a hole in it. Once the Column is resting at the bottom of the river not even Loki and all his Daemons will be able to get it back to the surface.’
‘Then if you’re decided, Colonel, I think the sooner we break the bad news to the rest of our fighters, the better.’
*
When all the WFA fighters had been landed from the Wu and mustered with her father’s Royalists, Trixie found herself commanding a ragtag army of six hundred men and women, not one of them with more than thirty rounds of ammunition to their name. It was difficult to imagine such a bedraggled outfit giving a crack SS regiment the turnaround. There was only one word to describe the mission they were intent on: suicidal.
‘Our objective tonight is a simple one: to destroy the Column of Loki,’ Trixie announced as she marched up and down in front of her fighters. ‘To accomplish this, the WFA, under the command of Major Wysochi here, will attack the SS compound and draw the UnFunnies away from the pontoon. This done, they will hold off any counter-attack to allow time for our friends the Royalists, under the command of Major Dashwood, to drag the pontoon containing the Column to the river and sink it.’
She stopped her pacing and turned to face her fighters. By the flickering light cast by the campfires she could see the fear on some of their faces. She wasn’t surprised. Most of the fighters were decidedly unhappy about finding themselves in Terror Incognita – it was, after all, the preferred setting for most of the horror stories popular in the Demi-Monde. Who knew what was lurking out there in the darkness ready to pounce?
‘I will be straight with you: this will be a desperate business. We are outnumbered and outgunned, but every day we delay, the enemy will grow stronger and more numerous. Our only advantage is surprise, so it is vital that we get as close to them as we are able without their being alerted that we’re the enemy. There will be no shooting and no talking until the enemy is engaged: your lives and those of your comrades depend on it. But make no mistake: what we are about is vital if the ForthRight is to be defeated. Fight hard and may ABBA be with you.’
They moved out three hours before dawn, Trixie having decided that instead of the route they’d taken when they’d made the reconnaissance – along the heavily wooded shoreline – it would be easier for a larger force to advance straight across Terror Incognita. The journey did little to settle the nerves of her fighters: Terror Incognita was a strange place and the noises it made at night eerie and unsettling.
This unease was heightened when they came to the gigantic mosaics that decorated the open spaces surrounding Mare Incognitum, mosaics formed from massive Mantle-ite stones that glowed and twinkled in the moonlight. And the worst of these was the representation of an enormous snake that lay coiled to the north of the Pyramid: by Trixie’s estimation, the snake was at least nine miles in length and a couple of hundred yards in width, coiling and twisting like a living thing.
‘Jörmundgandr,’ she heard her father whisper to her.
Trixie nodded: the snake did look like the great world-encompassing serpent of Pre-Folk legend, the serpent that would rise up during Ragnarok. But what Trixie found so astonishing wasn’t its mythological associations but the more prosaic thought of the effort that had been needed to construct the mosaic. It staggered the imagination that any people – Pre-Folk or otherwise – had had the motivation and the wherewithal to create such a thing. But what she was to see a few moments later was to make even this wonder pale into insignificance.
At the urging of Wysochi and her father the fighters bustled across the open space, managing to make it to the sanctuary of the trees bordering Mare Incognitum without being challenged. Here the trees were so tall and so tightly packed that the moonlight could not penetrate the foliage, and it was only thanks to Wysochi’s unerring sense of direction and the liberal use of his boot that the fighters eventually stumbled through the darkness to emerge at the foot of the Great Pyramid.
‘Will you look at that!’ whispered Wysochi. ‘It’s bloody enormous.’
It certainly was. Trixie had seen the photographs Speke had taken when he’d flown over Terror Incognita by balloon but even these hadn’t prepared her for the magnificence of the structure. Each of the Pyramid’s sides was a good three hundred feet in length and had been decorated with triangular slabs of Mantle-ite arranged in nine tiers. But it wasn’t the monumental scale of the thing that took Trixie’s breath away, it was the way it lit up the night. The LunarAtion emitted by such a mass of Mantle-ite suffused Terror Incognita with an ethereal radiation so that everything and everybody coming near the Pyramid appeared to have been dipped in luminous green paint.
As they moved nearer, one other oddity struck Trixie’s RaTionalist Mind: there appeared to have been three different varieties of Mantle-ite used in the Pyramid’s construction, these signalled by the shades of LunarAtion emitted from the triangular slabs. This was new: Trixie had never heard of there being different types of Mantle-ite and she wondered for a moment what they signified.
Her musings were interrupted by Wysochi. Practical as ever, he was moved to make a more mundane observation. ‘How is anyone going to get the Column to the top of that?’
A well-made point. The sloping sides of the Pyramid were slick and sleek, their Mantle-ite perfection only broken by a broad staircase – or what Trixie assumed to be a staircase – running from base to apex that bifurcated the northern side. ‘Beats me, Wysochi. Maybe that’s why Crowley is here. Maybe he’s going to magic the thing up to the top.’
But this, Trixie knew, was hokum. No mage, no matter how powerful, would be able to magic a two-hundred-ton Column up to the hexagonal platform at the top of the Pyramid. She turned to her father: he was the engineer of the family. ‘If raising the Column is an impossible task, maybe our best strategy is just to lie low and watch as the UnFunnies tear their hair out.’
Her father shook his head. ‘If the Flagellum Hominum sa
ys that getting the Column to the top of the Pyramid is doable, Trixie, then it must be doable. And remember, Crowley is a master of the occult so I think it would be unwise to rely on his incompetence.’
He was right. Crowley was no fool and if he knew enough to bring the Column to Terror Incognita then the chances were that he knew enough to get it to the top of the Pyramid.
A whispered warning from Wysochi brought her out of her reverie. ‘Enemy patrol, Colonel. I suggest we fall back into the woods.’
*
His Holiness Aleister Crowley, Head of the Church of the Doctrine of UnFunDaMentalism, had been unable to resist going to view the Great Pyramid by moonlight. After all, it was – according to the newly translated Flagellum Hominum – the most important source of ABBA’s energy in the Demi-Monde and it was this energy that, in a few short weeks, he would be using to change his world. And the Pyramid did not disappoint: as he came closer to it, he could feel the strength and the power it emitted, he could feel ABBA’s energy vibrating through his body, making his soul soar.
Crowley came to a halt at the foot of the strange staircase running up the Pyramid’s side. Waving back the soldiers of the SS detachment making up his bodyguard, he stood still for a moment to settle his nerves and then took the first tentative step onto the staircase. The staircase had ten hexagonal landings, each of which – with the exception of the bottommost – was numbered, but he was at a loss to understand the significance of the numbers. They seemed quite arbitrary.
When he reached the topmost platform he was out of breath, but the exhilaration he felt to be standing on one of the highest points in the whole of the Demi-Monde drove thoughts of such mundane discomfort from his mind. Here too the Pyramid held surprises: in the floor of the platform was set a dial with a single hand and the numbers zero to nine at intervals about its circumference. Again, Crowley had no idea as to its purpose, but this, he decided, was not the time to dwell on puzzles, not with all of the Demi-Monde laid out like an exquisitely modelled miniature beneath him.
