Ray’s gun goes off as Alex strips away the goggles. The venom-spitting fairy has gone, but even by mere moonlight, Alex can see that more are moving towards him between the trees. A human figure stands amongst them. It seems to bear the antlers of a deer, and is perhaps three metres tall.
Alex and Ray retreat, abandoning the body of the vampire fox. Alex fires off a dart wherever Ray points, but he doesn’t seem to hit anything, and has exhausted the magazine by the time they reach the shrine.
Katrina and the surviving Angry Ones are already there. There are not many of them. Mrs Powell is wrapping a bandage around the head of one—the creature snaps at her, and she slaps its face and calmly finishes her task.
Katrina, breathing so hard she’s almost hyperventilating, tells Alex mat she made a couple of sure kills, but one was dragged off and the other was a head shot.
‘But you brought it anyway, I hope,’ Alex says.
‘It’s over there.’
It is a squat thing, naked and covered in quills, with long heavily muscled arms that, when it was alive, would have dragged on the ground. Its skin is as tough as badgerhide, and Alex has trouble finding a vein. He tests for fembots, then squirts the rest of the blood into a little plastic beaker and drinks it straight down. It is cold and tastes vile, but although he gags he keeps it down.
Ray says, ‘How long? How long for our turn?’
‘Half a day, perhaps less,’ Alex says. He feels cold, then hot. He’s committed now. The fairy fembots will be crossing his mucous membranes into the backwaters of his capillaries, making their way into veins and then to the heart. Within minutes their presence will activate his rejigged immune system. Or at least, that’s the plan.
Something rockets through the canopy of the dark trees and bursts overhead, shedding a blue radiance that fills the ruins with light and shifting shadows. Everyone looks up.
‘This is no scouting group,’ Katrina says. ‘It is a full war party.’
Ray runs across to the pygmy mammoth and whispers to it, then runs back and tells Alex in an excited babble, ‘We go, meet up again. You ride, big man. Just tell him what to do. His name is Hannibal. It’s safe. He knows humans.’
The mammoth proves this by crooking one foreleg to make a kind of step when Alex approaches. With some difficulty, resisting the urge to pull himself up using the beast’s long, coarse hair, Alex climbs into the curved wooden seat on the mammoth’s back. Sitting there, on something more like a stool than a saddle, with only strips of leather to hold on to, it seems a long way to the ground.
Ray hands up Alex’s pack and says, ‘Put your legs out in front of you, it’s more comfortable. Don’t worry, Hannibal knows the way.’ He leans close and adds quietly, ‘We leave the old fart, eh? Not much meat on her bones, but they are grateful for anything they get.’
The blue flare is guttering out as it floats lower. A pall of sweet-smelling smoke drifts from it. Its failing light throws Ray’s shadow halfway across the clearing.
‘We’re all going together,’ Alex says. ‘I’m not travelling on my own.’
‘Ray’s right,’ Katrina says. ‘You’re the only one of us who can disarm the Crusade. Get away now, we’ll catch up.’
‘I’m supposed to ride a hairy elephant across thirty kilometres of rough terrain, while fairy fembots cook away inside me?’
‘We’ll meet up by morning,’ Katrina says firmly. ‘No problem. You look after your fat ass, Sharkey. Get the fuck out of here.’
Alex tells Ray, ‘You’ll look after Mrs Powell. I mean it.’
‘OK, big man. I won’t eat her.’
‘And make sure Kat doesn’t go and do something stupidly heroic and get herself killed.’
There’s a howl from the dark woods. A muscular, half-naked man rushes out of the trees into the moonlight. Half a dozen Angry Ones try to bring him down, but he scatters them with sweeps of a long staff. Lightnings flash from the staff’s metal tips, starting little fires in the dry grass.
‘Warewolf,’ Ray cries. Suddenly, he’s perched on the pygmy mammoth’s back, cowering behind Alex.
The man howls again, and flings his arms wide in triumph. Katrina steps forward and calmly shoots him in the head. The warewolf drops in its tracks, but now two fairy-sized things swoop across the clearing on wide, membranous wings. Fire from the ground downs one; the other does a half-roll and drops into the shifting shadows under the trees. Ray whacks at Hannibal’s hairy flank and springs to the ground with a whoop.
The pygmy mammoth takes off, running with a surprisingly quick and even gait. It’s like being in a boat speeding over a light chop; the waves are the muscles working under the mammoth’s hairy hide. Alex clings to the leather strips on either side of the seat until at last Hannibal slows to a trot. A great musty heat comes up from it. Alex gets his breath back, puffs out his cheeks. Hoo! He feels as if he has been running as fast as the mammoth.
Then, as the mammoth passes under the spread branches of an oak, a fairy ambushes Alex.
It lands on Alex’s back, catches hold of his hair and pulls back his head so that it can lay the edge of its knife blade against his throat. Prehensile toes claw at his flanks. Its head snakes around on a long neck and grins into Alex’s face. It has too many needle-pointed teeth in a narrow jaw, eyes that in the moonlight are no more than black holes under the boney shelf of its brow.
‘Surrender,’ it says.
Alex says slowly, feeling the edge of the knife with every syllable, ‘Take me to your leader.’
The fairy laughs, a spitting, sputtering sound like a kettle boiling dry. ‘Bad man,’ it says. ‘S-s-s-spy.’
‘No!’ Alex cries, thinking that the thing will cut his throat just for the fun of it. The fairy laughs again—and then a bubble of colour blooms around them. A man in black rushes towards them, hands raised in clutching claws, a black cloak lined with blood-red silk sustained behind him. He has a white face and burning eyes. It is the ghost Katrina set up to scare anyone who followed them.
Hannibal starts running, panicked by the apparition. Alex grabs the fairy’s arm. It is lithe and strong, but Alex is bigger and heavier and can exert more leverage. The knife falls. The fairy makes a wild lunge for it and Alex quickly shifts his grip and snaps its neck.
The dead fairy still clings to him; the secondary nervous system spun by its fembots has locked its muscles. As Alex tries to pry it loose, the fembots he’s ingested begin to work on him. Slowly, like an old-fashioned TV warming up, a new layer of reality is worked into his sight. The air is alive with bright motes that slant through the night, each as individual as a snowflake. It is as if every tree, every branch and every leaf, is coated with a frost of photons. Ahead, a glorious music rises in a neverending harmonic.
‘Welcome to our land,’ the fairy croaks. Its head lolls on its broken neck. Its eyes are points of red flame. Lines of golden light make arcane maps under its blue skin.
Alex is not afraid. It is as if the child who once stood with its mother on the shabby balcony of a highrise council flat, surveying the skeins of London’s lights, the child who somehow, by a strange and subtle transformation, became him, is now once again looking through his eyes.
He hears Lexis say, quite distinctly, ‘Fairyland!’ as Hannibal trots into a clearing at a bend in the overgrown road.
Everything is so clear, so bright. A wash of huge, blurry stars arches overhead. The glow of the half-moon that hangs above the treeline seems to be focused into a kind of temple of vaporous illumination in the middle of the road. Within that distilled light, a host of fairies and other creatures flank the two figures sitting on high-backed spiky chairs fretted from thin white spars that might be the bones of extinct birds.
A fairy runs forward and loops a silver thread over one of Hannibal’s tusks, draws him to the two seated figures.
‘My Ladies,’ the fairy at Alex’s back says in its flat, dead voice. ‘Here he is at last.’
Then its muscles finally give way to death,
and it falls at their feet. As one, they look up at Alex, their faces pale in the moonlight, and with a shock he sees that they both have the face of Milena, as she was when he first met her.
10 – Antoinette
At dawn, Spike finds Todd sleeping in a reclining chair, at the edge of a triangular terrace that angles out over the water. The lake stretches away under a brightening blue sky. A motorboat crewed by two dolls sits a little way offshore, rocking on the gentle swell.
When Spike shakes his shoulder, Todd comes awake thrashing, out of bad dreams of chases through obscure streets. His head still hurts, and he gratefully accepts Spike’s offer of a beer.
‘Hair of the dog,’ Spike says. ‘By the way, there’s a hole in your sock. The left one.’
‘Just call me Barefoot Joe.’
Todd downs the beer in two swallows, crushes the stressed plastic carton, and drops it into a tub of geraniums that are already beginning to drop their red petals in the brassy morning heat.
‘Oh man. Put a raw egg in the next one. And a dash of tabasco.’ Todd grinds the heels of his palms into his eyes. ‘I finished this bottle of Metaxa, and I think I swallowed the worm.’
‘Beer was all I could find,’ Spike says. He’s leaning on the iron rail, looking out at the lake. ‘I was talking with this Web cowboy last night. He claimed he was working for Glass, but there’s something bloody strange about him. I was in Afghanistan this one time—’
The butler, Ralph, walks out of the open French windows on to the terrace. He’s exchanged his butler’s rig for a brushed suede jacket and blue jeans. A big pistol is holstered at his hip. He wears video shades and an earplug. Behind him, half a dozen dolls cradle fat-barrelled M10 pulse rifles.
Todd says, ‘Spike—’
‘—and there were cowboys like that guy, working on some kind of scam—’
‘Spike, just get—’
‘—to bring down the Moscow stock exchange. Fucking long memories, the Mujahadeen. Anyway—’
‘—your fucking drone, OK?’
‘There’s no need, gentlemen,’ Ralph says. ‘Everything is recorded here.’
He claps his hands, and dolls carry a table covered with heavy white linen on to the terrace. Chairs are brought, silverware laid in flashing patterns. A large-screen TV is placed at one end of the table. The dolls offer fruit and herbal teas, and look confused when Todd asks for coffee. Their sly blue faces peek from beneath powdered wigs. They have white gloves, peach-coloured silk jackets and puffed breeches, and buckled shoes of shiny patent leather.
Once Spike and Todd are seated, the TV comes on. Antoinette says, ‘I’m sorry that I couldn’t see you last night. Things are reaching a climax.’
She is standing in a white room. Behind her, sunlight falls through a window. She wears a white silk robe that puddles around her feet. Her hair is piled into an asymmetrical layered cone of tightly packed charcoal-coloured curls, slashed by a vivid white streak.
Todd says, ‘This would be something to do with a guy called Frodo McHale?’
Spike says, ‘That’s the cowboy I was telling you about. He—’
‘Shut up, Spike,’ Todd says.
Antoinette says, ‘Manufacturing a permanent cocktail party was Glass’s way, when we first met, of showing me that he could also change the hearts and minds of people. It is not a very good joke, but I love him deeply, and I don’t have the heart to let them go. They’ll be sleeping now, like so many vampires. At night, their fembot personality constructs stir, and they live again. As for this place, it’s become a mausoleum. Glass was researching—’
‘Something to do with the ultimate in virtual reality,’ Todd says.
On the TV, Antoinette walks over to the sunlit window. A breeze sustains long white curtains around her. She says, ‘Glass wanted immortality. He was on his third heart and his second pair of lungs and was weary of the flesh. He was to be the first human to cross the mind-machine barrier. But you know that, Mr Hart. You were allowed to find that out.’
‘I was? Listen, if this is all some kind of PR stunt it’s frankly not in very good taste. Perhaps I better—’
‘Sit down,’ the butler, Ralph, says.
‘Sure. You’re the one with the gun. You and these little blue suckers here. Are dolls allowed to bear arms, by the way? I thought there was some kind of UN treaty about that.’
‘We’re in the neutral zone,’ Ralph says. ‘Besides, they aren’t exactly dolls.’
Todd leans on the table, fitting his elbows amongst a clutter of chased silver cutlery and translucent porcelain. ‘Tell me about this fabulous experiment. Did it work?’
The view on the TV zooms into close-up as Antoinette returns Todd’s stare. Her eyes have pupils of beaten copper.
‘Glass was translated six months ago. His functions are active, but he isn’t talking. That will change.’
‘And the computers are here.’
‘This is his research institute, the heart of what Glass calls the Library of Dreams, but Glass isn’t exactly here. He’s everywhere and nowhere.’
‘Did you tick the no publicity box?’
Antoinette blinks.
‘I mean, I’m not learning very much here. I haven’t even met you, in the flesh.’
‘I believe you’ve already been in the Library of Dreams, Mr Hart. You used one of the decks last night. They access only the Library.’
‘I tried to get hold of my office. They’ll be looking for me.’
‘They know you’re on a field investigation. What you accessed was not your network’s node, but a simulation. Among other things, the Library of Dreams has mapped a version of the Web into itself, for its own purposes. It is contiguous with the Web, but it is not topologically connected with it.’
‘A simulation of the Web? What kind of computing power does Glass have?’
‘The Library of Dreams isn’t a simulation of the Web. It takes what it needs and uses it to generate the world where Glass first awakened. It is a little like a pocket universe.’
‘I saw someone there,’ Todd says. ‘A burning man, a man on fire. Or made of fire. Was that Glass?’
‘What you saw wasn’t Glass. That’s a creature derived from the Children’s Crusade. The horned King in the real world, what you call the burning man when he crosses over. His nervous system has been rebuilt by Frodo McHale and his acolytes. You might say he is the first real astronaut of the Web. Or he would be, if he could escape from the Library of Dreams. You met Frodo McHale last night. I think he wants to make sure that I know he’s back.’
‘You don’t like him.’
‘He wants to kill me, Mr Hart.’
‘He has hired mercenaries,’ the butler says. ‘They reached the other side of the lake two days ago.’
‘I expect they’re watching you have breakfast,’ Antoinette says. ‘Frodo McHale wants to use the Children’s Crusade for his own ends. Glass and I want to neutralize it.’
‘That’s a very emotive word. Does it mean what it implies?’
‘I want to destroy the fairies who created the Children’s Crusade, too. Does that shock you?’
‘I thought they were destroyed. There was that thing just outside Paris—’
‘The Peace Police claim to have solved the problem of the fairies, but although the Magic Kingdom is dispersed, it lives on. Frodo McHale wants the Children’s Crusade, and I want to finish it. It’s out of control. With creatures like the burning man, it threatens to spread to the Web, and I can’t allow that.’
Now Todd knows what Antoinette’s white-streaked pile of hair reminds him of. Elsa Lanchester. Bride of Frankenstein.
He says, ‘That stuff’s out of date. I can’t make any kind of pitch with it. No one wants to hear fright stories about Frankenstein running around out of control.’
‘The monster,’ Spike says.
Todd looks at him.
‘The monster,’ Spike says again. He takes a bite of sweet pastry and says around it, ‘It was the monster
that ran off. Frankenstein was the scientist who made it. It didn’t have a name.’
Antoinette says, ‘These days monster and scientist, creator and created, are often the same. You see, Mr Hart, the problem I have. I am not a storyteller. I am not a journalist.’
‘You want me to tell your story. I have to tell you it’s a pretty good story, by the way.’
‘I tried to escape what I had been, and I lost control of what I made. Now the burning man is loose in the Library of Dreams, and soon he’ll cross over into the Web, him and hundreds like him. They’ll saturate the Web with fairy memes. Perhaps they will deny the Web to us. And what then?’
‘Why is this important to you?’
‘Because I’m going to join my dear lover, and live forever. You’re the only American journalist I could reach. Glass has a story to tell, and because he’s still a US citizen, it’s best told to a US audience. Seventy per cent of the Web’s computing power is located in the States, after all.’ The TV flickers, shows Antoinette in medium shot. She holds out her hands as if to reach through the glass and says, ‘Can I trust you, Mr Hart?’
Spike laughs.
‘Shut up, Spike,’ Todd says.
There’s a noise far out across the lake. It is the flat thump of a mortar round.
Todd is on his feet, torn between running and diving under the table. The motorboat is making a run in towards the shore, zigzagging this way and that. It is pursued by a small, slow, smart missile. The motorboat’s engines roar as it makes a last desperate turn. The missile leaps forward and the motorboat disappears in a rising plume of white water. Spike grabs Todd’s arm, points. Another missile is skimming across the lake, heading towards the southern wing of the complex. Its slim body and flat stabilizing vanes are marked with a red and white chequerboard pattern, vivid against the blue water.
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