Last Stand in Lychford

by Paul Cornell

  So, new rules had been imposed here, and they’d wiped over the . . . code . . . that had previously been in place. The rules might tend toward the orderly and practical, but they’d mushed up the experience of walking around here.

  Therefore, it might actually be easier to find the castle. Where had the vast, weird, literally fairytale home of the king been? Previously, she wouldn’t have even said that “where” was a suitable word. But now she could feel its presence as a gravity, right in the middle of this world. Of course. It would be, so now it was. The literal had encountered fairy and bolted it all down so they could make use of it.

  And she could use that.

  Autumn set off in pursuit of the obvious.

  * * *

  “So you’re saying that because I ran for the council, because I believe we should be in control of our borders, I’m on the list to die?” A red-faced man in the crowd was shouting at Lizzie. Others were joining in, trying to explain their own passionate beliefs and why they shouldn’t be held against them.

  “I don’t think it’s trying to kill us.” Lizzie was trying to make herself heard. “If it was, why did it stop, why didn’t it just roll over us?” But now her voice wasn’t carrying over the crowd. There were children here, and a lot of vulnerable elderly. She didn’t want to turn this into a riot. “I’ll get back to you when we know anything more,” she said. “If your homes are still inside the wall, maybe you should go back to them. If not, I’m sure—” She’d been going to mention the coffee bars, but the hubbub had increased to the point where nobody was listening. Relieved, she let Zoya take her arm and hustle her away toward the church, Jas in one arm and Lizzie in the other. Zoya had quite some muscles, Lizzie realised. And the lack of giving a damn required to use her elbows to get past people. A moment later, Luke was beside Lizzie on the other arm, her literal wing man. He was a trifle more polite, actually apologising to the people they shoved past.

  They went into the church and found Lizzie’s office, where they could put the kettle on and close a door behind them, so at least any questions would be urgent ones. Lizzie went to find the kettle. “Well, I let them all down there.”

  “You did all you could,” said Zoya. “These are the general public. The general public suck.”

  Lizzie appreciated the support, but couldn’t quite bring herself to accept it. “So the enemy are concentrating the believers in one place. Which is maybe why the wall stopped moving. Perhaps it’d served its purpose.”

  Into the room, without knocking, strode Trill. He was looking worried.

  “Where’s Autumn?” said Lizzie.

  “As far as I know, she continued on her quest.”

  “Then . . . yes. Okay. I won’t be able to text her then. Okay.”

  “I was just thinking on my way back that you were having some weird weather here.”

  “Global warming,” said Luke.

  “Ah. Is that why there’s something incredibly powerful building in the clouds up there?”

  Lizzie was about to ask “oh God, is this it?” when she heard the sound of rain on the roof, the sound you only heard when that rain was coming hard and fast. And then, from outside, she started to hear the sound of screams.

  * * *

  Lizzie ran out of the church into the graveyard, the others close behind her. It was indeed raining hard, harder than she’d ever seen. It was like videos she’d seen on monsoons. But nobody gathered outside was running from it. Instead they were staring up into it. The expressions on their faces were ecstatic. They were holding their palms up to catch the rain, spooning it into their mouths.

  Luke nudged her and pointed down. On the ground, the rain was already gathering in deep puddles on the uneven cobbles of the church path.

  The rain was bright blue.

  * * *

  Autumn had started to see the castle in the distance. Sometimes it was suddenly in front of her, and sometimes it was far away, but she knew that was just her perceptions, while her feet, and her fear, told her she was getting steadily closer.

  Her fear, yeah. Because this thing, this building, if it was truly a building, still had a hold over her, a terror deeper than the shifting mass of reality could create. She kept putting that aside, kept putting one foot in front of another.

  There were still fairies here, but they were . . . diffuse, intelligences that were always just over there, fluttering in circles, kept in cages within their own land. It was her difference, she was starting to realise, that let her walk here at all.

  She kept the central horror of her life straight ahead and kept forcing herself to approach it.

  * * *

  Lizzie had tried to pull some of those outside back into the church, but Zoya, Trill, and Luke had grabbed her and hauled her inside. She watched from the porch as more and more of those caught in the downpour were starting to look upward. Were they exulting in what the rain was doing to them, or were they seeing something up there?

  “If . . .” Zoya said, standing beside her, “this last rain you had, which was not blue I take it, if that could get to you whether you were inside or not . . .”

  This time Lizzie managed to restrain herself from swearing. “We don’t know what it’s meant to be doing. Can you feel anything weird?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “No,” said Jas.

  “Just that that’s more fairy blood than I’ve ever seen, falling on the ground like it’s weather,” said Trill, sounding annoyed.

  “I can feel something,” said Luke. “I can feel . . . something great!”

  And before they could grab him, he’d run out into the rain, and started to cry out, pointing joyously at the sky.

  * * *

  Autumn was looking up at the castle. And now she was certain it wasn’t really a building. It was something the fairies had built, yes, something that meant security and centrality to them. But it could equally have been a heart. As she thought that, horrifyingly, that was what it became—just for an instant. This thing was a metaphor that her mind, formed as it had been in a stew of postcolonial fear and anger, automatically translated as a seat of feudal power. But the power it contained was different to that which humans had tamed down into a soap opera about “royalty.”

  The fear, the knowledge of the illusion, however, made it easier to get inside. One needs to find a drawbridge or a window to enter a castle. How does one enter a heart? One begins anywhere.

  And so Autumn stepped forward and kept taking steps, not letting her eyes lead her, but feeling the fear of what lay inside this heart or castle or concept and aiming herself straight for it.

  * * *

  “Oh God, I can feel it,” said Zoya.

  “I feel weird,” agreed Jas.

  “Tell me about it,” said Lizzie to both of them. “Quickly.” They were still all standing in the church porch, because Lizzie couldn’t come up with any sort of plan to deal with this. The rain, she assumed, must have been created along with the dome, waiting up there as clouds ready to go when the container reached the right size, like some sort of ecological project.

  “It’s like . . . reading the tabloids at the Chinese takeaway—the only time I read them,” whispered Zoya, her pupils enormous. “It’s all everyone else’s fault. All their fault. Whoever they are. Something great is coming that will save me, and bring justice to all those who’ve wronged me, and make my little girl better, and everyone will get their just deserts. But . . .” And Lizzie saw her actually gritting her teeth. “My little girl can’t ‘get better.’ She’s fine as she is. I do not want to believe that. I do not believe any of it. Believing that shit is how I got here.” And she actually slapped herself across the face.

  “Don’t, Mummy,” shouted Jas. “Something great is coming! Father Christmas is coming!”

  Lizzie hated the sound of enforced belief in the little girl’s voice. She quickly performed a blessing over both of them, keeping eye contact with Zoya as she did so, and then added to it some basic protec
tive spells that Autumn had forced her to learn. Oh God, she was performing spells now. She said the complicated words in what probably wasn’t a real language several times, and then found, wonderfully, that Jas had joined in, seeming to find immediate comfort and support in the repetition. And then she started repeating Lizzie’s blessing too. And then Trill joined in with some words of his own that sang with ancient power, and the little girl added them to the routine, looking up at her mother and grinning as she ran through the whole list over and over. “Father Christmas isn’t coming,” she said finally.

  “No,” said her mother, letting out a long breath. “No he is bloody not, not until Christmas Day. And this is not Christmas Day. And I very much want to thump something again for making me think like that.”

  Lizzie wanted to hug her. So she did. She didn’t expect it to be reciprocated quite so warmly, so she quickly disengaged again. “I think we’ll be okay if we go out there now. Do you want me to go first?” She was pleased to have done something useful and was desperately looking to sustain that, she realised. She was hoping that, in doing something helpful, she would find that she had some indication from her God about the contradictions she could feel increasingly underlined inside her.

  Jas had gone to the doorway and was looking at the sky. Then she looked back to Lizzie. “You need to come out,” she said.

  * * *

  Autumn was doing her best not to scream.

  She was at the very threshold of something that felt like . . . like an emotional black hole. Like her attending a fascist rally. It was someone else’s passion that cared for her not at all, that saw her as an alien invader. As these increasingly powerful waves of emotion flowed over her with every step, what she was seeing varied from moment to moment too. If this was a castle, it was eating her. There were stairwells here it was impossible to climb back up. This was a woman-eating plant, a deadly flower, an amoeba, a trap.

  This awful power was despised by its new owners, and yet it was still implicit and central in this world. Autumn wanted to burn it down. No, free it. Maybe free it while burning it down? She knew what was at the centre of it, and that had been bad enough last time, when all she’d had to face was this thing’s own nature.

  She thought, despairingly, about Lizzie asking her to come back. To run. That felt so important. But Lizzie, of all people, knew that wasn’t the most important thing.

  Protecting other people was the most important thing.

  Autumn closed her eyes, closed her extra senses, too, started to climb, blindly, toward the gradient that would any moment drop her into oblivion.

  * * *

  Lizzie had carefully left the porch, Trill, Zoya and Jas with her, and, braving the rain, which now seemed to be lessening, looked up into the sky where now everyone, Luke included, was pointing. Lizzie hoped she could use the protective incantations on him, too, but it was going to take time they might not have.

  Incredibly, Lizzie saw, there were figures in the sky. And they were descending. A group of three fairies. Behind them shone a golden light, and it was getting brighter and brighter. “I didn’t know your lot could do that,” she said to Trill.

  “We can’t,” said Trill.

  The descending fairies were armed, with bows, shields, swords. Perhaps these were some of the assassins who’d come after them. The expressions on their faces were calm, unworried.

  Trill stepped forward, evidently furious to see his people like this. Zoya seemed to note that and squared her shoulders, ready to fight.

  The fairies landed right in front of them. The people, the believers, all around, flocked quickly to them, but kept a little distance. Some of them had fallen to their knees in wonder.

  One of the fairies that faced them suddenly jerked, and his face gained expression, so now Lizzie could honestly say he was looking at her. But she felt that whatever mind inhabited him it wasn’t his own. “Hello again,” the fairy said.

  Lizzie realised with a shock that his voice was that of David Cummings.

  “Yes, I’m awake again. Bit of a sore head. But it didn’t put me out of action for long. The boss is on his way. So, you can save any more of your finnicky little words for the big man. Where’s the other one?”

  Lizzie realised he meant Autumn. “She got out, hopefully,” she said. “Through your wall. She’s gone to find help.”

  Which seemed to satisfy Cummings. Lizzie supposed that, if he had some way of knowing whether or not she was telling the truth, that test had been passed. “Then she’s no concern of ours. But look, what’s this? You have a fairy of your own. Ah. That must be how you escaped us. Well, he’s been exposed to enough blood, let’s get him back onside.” He clicked his fingers.

  Trill, to Lizzie’s horror, seemed to react. But then he recovered and raised an eyebrow. “I felt that. But it didn’t work. You have no power over me, foul beast.”

  The fairy with Cummings’ voice opened his mouth in shock. Then he closed it again. “Well. I’d now fry you like I did your prince. Except that might spoil the effect we’re going for here. Moving on. Time to meet the boss.”

  An enormous sound came from the sky.

  Lizzie had always distantly had, in the back of her mind, some idea of the end of the world. She suspected the younger generation felt it even more than she did. There was, of course, a thread to her religion about the Kingdom, and what would happen at the end of everything. But keeping one’s eyes on that was a trap she’d seen a lot of her folk fall into. She’d always preferred the sort of Christianity that worried more about what was going to happen at the food bank on Monday.

  And yet, despite all her protections, despite the specific power of her own faith, or perhaps because of it, she felt the enormous thing that was now coming down in exactly the way the enemy expected her to feel it.

  She could see it too. It was descending through the sky like its heralds had, presumably through the wall above, billowing in clouds of what could well be fairy blood.

  It was an angel. An enormous, destroying, completing angel.

  It had four faces, one on each side of its head. The light haloed around that head, framing it exactly like something out of a medieval painting. The faces were golden, the eyes empty, the expression on each mouth a placid smile. The angel wore armour, and a fluttering tabard, on the front of which was emblazoned a lion. The angel carried a flaming sword.

  Lizzie felt herself reacting not so much to the imagery, but with her extra senses. Which this being must be broadcasting to, as well as through the blood. She looked quickly to Zoya. “What can you see?”

  “Big Marvel superhero propaganda.”

  “Father Christmas,” said Jas. “Fake Father Christmas.”

  So they could see it, too, despite Zoya not even having the benefits of the first rain, the one from the well in the woods. This thing was really ticking all the boxes. Lizzie looked to the crowd across the churchyard and marketplace. Among those ecstatic faces were surely many who didn’t believe in a Christian end of the world, in any end of the world, but whatever this was was enthralling them too. Cummings had said something about individually tailored fantasies, hadn’t he? So presumably they were all seeing what they wanted to see. Not every religion believed in an end of the world, but then, you didn’t get many Buddhists in Lychford. She wished she could ask Sunil, but he hadn’t returned. Perhaps he’d got through the wall. She looked back up, guiltily aware that she’d been trying to distract herself from her own increasing feelings of religious awe.

  Above her was coming loyalty and reward and justice. It was, despite everything, welcome. It was making her want to cry just looking at it, to cry not in fear, but in horrid exuberance, like a baby crying on the breast of its mother. The feeling made her feel excited and sick at the same time. She could hear actual cheering from some of the crowd, on top of a lot of sobbing. “I . . . didn’t,” she managed to say, looking back to the fairy that was channelling Cummings, “expect your boss to look like that.”


  “Yeah,” said the fairy, “he gets that a lot.”

  The gigantic being dropped deftly onto his sandaled toes in the graveyard, right next to the statue of Pipkin the church cat that had, for a brief and glorious six weeks, been the central feature of Pokemon interest in the little market town. As Lizzie watched, the being shrunk, with a noise like a reverse orchestra, down to being just a little bit taller than anyone else.

  The four faces contemplated the crowd. Here was the ultimate headmaster, hard but fair. Here was someone to be feared. Here was someone to be adored. Lizzie felt enormous emotion wash over her, over all the crowd. This was like . . . patriotism, an enormous good feeling at being part of something that was in itself unquestionably good. This was the feeling that everyone assumed Lizzie felt all the time, but it was actually the feeling her entire training had been about distrusting the taste of.

  This being was bigger to her extra senses than any she had ever encountered. Silence fell. They were all waiting for it to speak.

  And then it inclined its head to look at her.

  “Lizzie,” the voice said. And it was as warm and golden as the light of the flaming sword as it fluttered over them all. Lizzie was startled, flattered, horribly, that it was addressing her directly. “You’ve worked so hard. But the end is here. Justice is here. Even Lucifer has played his part, as is ordained.” He nodded toward the fairy that was channelling Cummings. “I am here to divide the good from the evil. I am the alpha and the omega, the end of all conflict, the end of the world.”