Aliens In My Garden

by Jude Gwynaire

  ‘A niche for taking people prisoner and growing Blackheart Bindweed,’ Big Red pointed out.

  ‘Y’know I really wish you hadn’t said “growing,”’ said Alditha. ‘Hadn’t occurred to me that he grew all this. Like a dark garden, all of his own.’

  ‘Didn’t,’ sniffed Odiz. ‘Was old Salu-Valek who started the Maze. Used to be stories about it, but hadn’t heard anything of it since young Skoros was born. Till today, obviously.’

  ‘Still here, though,’ said Alditha. ‘He’s been cultivating it. That sounds a bit too much like practice for being a Gardener for my liking.’

  ‘Crikey,’ said Odiz. ‘He’s trying to get his hands on the Manual of the EngineSeers. If he’s been practicing to be a Gardener too, that could be astonishingly dangerous.’

  ‘Oh, you think?’ snapped Alditha.

  ‘What’s the Manual of the-’ asked Big Red.

  ‘Oh, there’ll be a book,’ sighed Alditha, exasperated. ‘One thing you can always guarantee with wizards is there’s a book at the heart of everything.’

  ‘There is,’ agreed Odiz, either missing or ignoring the sarcasm. ‘The Manual of the EngineSeers. Tells you how to be one, apparently. How to do the ultimate magic.’ Odiz scratched his moustache. ‘Not called that, o’ course. It’s called The Somethin’ NIB-IRU somethin’ Codex. Foreign lingo, y’know how it is. But that’s what he’s after. Kept on about the symbol o’ the EngineSeers, and where to find it and all that guff.’

  Something went ‘click’ in Alditha’s mind.

  ‘This symbol. Red star, wings?’

  ‘Good grief. That’s privileged mage knowledge, y’know.’

  ‘As I say, if we survive this, I’ll introduce you to a girl who’ll privilege your brains out. So, the Astarians became the EngineSeers in our legends,’ she mused to herself.

  ‘The who?’

  Alditha smirked just a little. ‘The EngineSeers. They’re not from round here. They’re from another planet altogether. They really like bread and jam.’

  ‘Aliens? The EngineSeers are-’

  ‘Like I say, I’ll introduce you if you really like. There’s one swanning about the place right now. We really need to find her.’

  ‘Blimey. Can you imagine how much Skoros would want a word with her?’

  Alditha frowned, her eyebrows knitting together. ‘Did I mention we really need to find her?’

  ‘Sagar, first,’ said Big Red. It was that way with demons—sometimes they were chatty, sometimes they didn’t say anything for weeks and you had to poke them with sticks to make sure they were still alive.

  ‘Hmm?’ Alditha blinked. ‘Mm, yes. When we catch up with Skoros, couldn’t hurt to have a dragon on our side. Alright, but Sagar, then Celeste, yes?’

  ‘Celeste would be the-?’

  ‘The EngineSeer, yes.’

  ‘Be dashed useful to have her on our side as well, then.’

  Alditha sighed. Wizards. ‘You’ve got a big book at home, where it says you should always state the obvious in stressful situations, haven’t you?’ she muttered, setting off again through the slithering, hissing Maze.

  __________

  Razor hadn’t said a word for hours. Not through the business with Celeste and Alpha, not through the horrible business with the trees, though he doubted he’d ever get the smell of smoke out of his wing feathers. Not through the grandstanding with the crowd and the killing of Timmoluk. He didn’t particularly want to say anything now, either, as the tips of the pyramids began to flash faster and faster.

  It was a strange life, being a magic-user’s familiar. You were bound to do what they told you, bound to do what they wanted, even before they told you what it was.

  And yet...

  And yet you don’t have to like it, he thought, sighing heavily through his beak-holes. Then again, maybe you don’t even have to do it. Seeing Harper, alone up there, without Alditha, had been weird. Wrong, somehow, but he’d still done it—and all to protect the world from what he thought was a threat. Razor sighed again, watching his master punch the goblin.

  ‘Thought you could run away from me, did you?’ Skoros landed a blow on Gunkin’s jaw. It didn’t have much force—he’d never been much good when it came to hitting people—but still, it looked like it stung.

  Gunkin turned his eyes on Skoros, and there was nothing in them but a spiderweb of mockery. ‘Feel better now, do you? Like a good dose of punchin’ someone smaller than yourself, I expect. Mind you, don’t suppose you get to do it all that often.’

  Gunkin stopped as another punch smashed into his mouth. He rooted around with his tongue, then spat a sharp tooth back at Skoros. ‘You wanna watch yourself, my lord. Many a numpty’s come unstuck by waving something they wanted to keep near a goblin’s mouth.’ He flashed his disconcerting smile in the dark lord’s face. ‘Fists included.’

  ‘Would you prefer me to break your legs?’ demanded Skoros. ‘Hey, where do you think you’re going, owl?’

  Harper had been edging ever further out of Skoros’ reach. ‘What are you going to do, wizard? You can’t beat up an owl,’ he remonstrated. ‘Quite apart from the fact that there are treaties and such, you haven’t got enough scars to convince me you’ve ever punched an owl. We’re all talons and beak, don’t you know.’

  Skoros chuckled. ‘You’re right of course. I can’t punch an owl, even one in a stupid visor.’

  ‘I should think not.’

  ‘Much better to roast you on a spit,’ spat the wizard.

  Skoros paused. When you’ve lived with someone most of your life, you get accustomed to the way they think, the way they speak. You begin to leave pauses in your speech for them to have their moment. Now, he fully expected Razor to butt in with a ‘Raaark. Err, Boss, maybe not the best thing to do, bringing the witch down on us like a ton of bricks, raaark.’ However, this time, there was only silence.

  The wizard looked around. Razor was just visible, flying over the trees and houses. Getting away.

  He looked back at Harper. The owl turned his head deliberately sideways. ‘Raaaark?’ he demanded.

  Skoros snarled, pulled his wand, pointing the corkscrew end right between Harper’s eyes, and seemed on the verge of doing something nasty to the bird, when-

  -there was a wub-wub-wub-wub-wub sound, followed by a series of bings from the pyramids. Harper straightened his neck without ever taking his eyes off the wand.

  Each of the pyramids split open down the middle, the metal walls parting with a smooth shushing sound and a wisp of steam.

  Skoros stepped back from Gunkin and Harper and went back to his orbs.

  Harper blinked, then shivered. Slowly, each of the six pyramids gave up their treasure. A tall, thin, bulbous-headed grey alien with blank dark eyes stepped out of every one.

  And in the sky he tried his best not to look at, the worms and beetles and other scuttling monsters grew sharper, grew larger, grew closer to the world, as though the sky was heavy with them, and threatening to burst.

  15

  ‘So about that theory of yours,’ whispered Alditha.

  ‘What-?’ said Odiz aloud before Alditha clapped a hand over his mouth.

  ‘The theory that we were put out of the way because Skoros thought we might be able to deal with the orbs.’ She gestured to where Sagar, the Blue Dragon was being held, motionless, in the beams of three orbs. ‘Skoros obviously considers Sagar to be a bigger risk than us three. Mind you, even for a dragon, he is quite big.’

  Odiz counted them, noted where each of them were positioned. ‘Damn and blast the man,’ he whispered.

  ‘That’s the plan for later,’ Alditha assured him. ‘Any plans for now? Believe me when I tell you the odds aren’t good. I’ve already tried the whole “three of them, three of us” technique. Didn’t turn out too well.’

  Odiz snorted. ‘Never knew a witch that could count properly,’ he whispered.

  Alditha pursed her lips, as if to say ‘Take that back old man, or you and I are go
ing to have a falling out.’

  ‘One, two three,’ counted Odiz, pointing at each of them in turn. Then his extra left hand waved its fingers. ‘Four,’ said Odiz. ‘Five,’ he added when the extra right waved too. ‘And, well...’ He humphed a sigh that was too heavy for someone engaged on an espionage mission. ‘I’m prepared to make it six as long as you two agree never to speak of it to anyone. Agreed?’

  Big Red blinked and shrugged. Alditha looked curious, but inclined her head a fraction of a degree.

  Odiz closed his eyes tight, held his breath, and went a deeper shade of pink than he always was. All at once, with a loud ripping sound, his beard came free of his face, standing there like a hairy shadow in front of him.

  ‘Yaaaaargh,’ yelled the mage, making one of the orbs that was guarding Sagar twitch. It drifted away from the dragon a little and hovered, as though sniffing for a scent. Odiz’ disembodied hands each raised three fingers, showing six in total. Alditha turned her eyes up in her head, and the tip of her new bindweed hat unraveled, twitching and slithering down her body, till only the last ring of the foul black weed was around her head. She held up one hand, and two fingers of the other. Seven against three. Eight if they could only distract the orbs long enough to let Sagar himself get a shot at them. Alditha didn’t breathe. Breathing during ambush situations, she decided, was vastly overrated. The unraveled weed began to slither softly through the undergrowth, while Odiz’ enchanted beard scuttled up a tree trunk. You soon had to already know it was there to be able to follow its progress. Alditha watched it, determined not to look at the now beardless, triple-chinned old man beside her. She understood why he didn’t want this spoken of—a mage without his beard was like a witch without her hat. It made you ordinary, and ordinary was dangerous for a witch or a wizard. Ordinary made you desperate.

  She felt the ground underneath her, felt the slithering slow progress of the weed. Saw the beard on a branch, preparing its attack. She swallowed.

  Then everything was happening at once. The beard leapt, jumping into the air like a flying squirrel, landing on the suspicious orb and quickly shifting its shape, forming a cone of hair that slid down the sphere and jabbed into the hole from which the beam was coming. The beam that was helping keep a huge blue dragon motionless.

  The thing about Big Red was...

  Well, there were two things about Big Red. First, he was big. And second, he was red. He was also, however much of a pussycat he seemed to people who were nice to him, a demon. All the time they’d been standing, waiting to begin the attack, he’d been sucking up power from the ground itself. Now, in the moment of the orb’s confusion, he roared, put down his head, and pointed the tips of both his curved horns at the second orb. Thick waves of deep red energy pulsed off the horns and joined together in mid-air, screaming towards the orb as one firm bolt of power. The orb exploded.

  Alditha and Odiz, as one, fired bolts of their magic at the last of the orbs. It dodged and swerved them, keeping its beam of restraining power trained on Sagar.

  Alditha concentrated, forming the bindweed that had slithered away from her into a noose with the power of her mind. It leapt and lassoed the third orb, slowing down its ability to dodge the blasts of magic. Slowing it down, but not, sadly, stopping it.

  The thing about Sagar was that he was blue. But the other thing about him, the thing that people and orbs forgot at their peril, was that he was also a dragon. While initially willing to be imprisoned by Skoros to save his life, the dragon had grown increasingly angry at being incarcerated in the Maze. Whereas a single orb and the element of surprise had been enough to subdue Odiz and Alditha, it had eventually taken three orbs, constantly covering him with their paralysis beams, to keep Sagar subdued.

  As the final orb dodged and weaved out of the way of the blasts of magic, Sagar brought his neck up, opened his mouth, and crunched. The orb crackled and fell to bits, and Sagar spat it out.

  ‘Ugh. Horrible,’ he pronounced. ‘It’s all oily. What that’s gonna do to my digestion, I shudder to think.’

  The first orb, the one with Odiz’ beard stuffed in its beam-nozzle, had bobbed away to the back end of the dragon, away from the jaws of death.

  There are many rules about sharing an environment with a dragon. To be fair, the first and most important of those rules is to keep away from the pointy front end where all the teeth and the fiery breath are kept.

  Unfortunately for the orb, the second rule is to keep away from the back end, too. The back end leaves you open not only to Hell’s flatulence, but the whim of the dragon’s extremely sensitive tail. Being hit by an adult dragon’s tail, according to Granny Melandra’s Almanack of Dragon Keeping, the foremost authority in the Garden on the subject, is ‘like bein’ hit by a tree-trunk made o’ cow.’

  Sagar swung his tail, there was the sound of rupturing metal, and the orb fell out of the air, hitting the ground with a spasming crunch. It flickered for a moment, then all its light and life went out. Odiz’ beard immediately unfurled itself from the nozzle, and danced a jig of victory on the dead orb’s casing.

  Odiz whistled, and the beard jumped up, and flew through the air, turning and tumbling as it went. It hit his face and there was the opposite of a loud sucking sound, a kind of sccccchhhlukk as hairs sank their roots back into pores, and settled back into their home.

  ‘Yyyyyeeee-arrgh,’ yelled the mage. ‘Swear it hurts more going in.’

  Alditha snapped her fingers, and the bindweed slithered back to her, up her back, and reassembled the hat on her head.

  ‘Care to buy into my theory now?’ asked the mage.

  Alditha raised one eyebrow.

  __________

  ‘You do not compute,’ said the alien.

  ‘Do I not?’ asked Skoros, fighting the urge to giggle. ‘I am the king of this world. You are one of the Sleepers, are you not?’

  ‘Bio-mech Delta-Epsilon-Kappa,’ said the bulbous-headed thing. “The Sleepers” does not conform to any description in my databank.’

  ‘You are from somewhere else,’ explained Skoros. ‘Another star, another world?’

  There was a silence, and the alien fixed him with those dark, disturbing eyes. ‘Confirmed,’ it said eventually. ‘You have Astarian survey-orbs, but scans of your biology indicate you are not Astarian. You will explain this dichotomy, or you will be treated as hostile.’ It raised a hand towards him. Out of the corner of his eye, Skoros could see the other aliens had done the same.

  ‘Easy,’ he cautioned. ‘I am not your enemy—I am your friend. I welcome you to the Garden—to my Garden...to my world.’

  Bio-mech Delta-Epsilon-Kappa ran scans. ‘There was no intelligent life on this world when the survey team were forced into cryo-sleep. Internal and external chronometers confirm there has been insufficient time for evolution to produce life forms of your level of intelligence-’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Skoros, smiling a sudden, dangerous smile.

  Skoros could never have predicted what happened next—it came out of nowhere. The Bio-mechs pointed their hands at the orbs, and power erupted out of them, white-hot and furious. The two orbs dribbled to puddles of melted metal on the floor.

  ‘Technological theft has been rectified,’ reported one of the other, as-yet-unnamed aliens.

  Skoros blanched. ‘Now, wait a minute.’

  ‘Mission parameters were to find an uninhabited world. An uninhabited world was found. Scans confirm this is that world.’ Bio-mech Delta reached out and grabbed Skoros by his wizard’s robe. ‘You are an error,’ said the Bio-mech, its dark eyes growing larger in its head. ‘You will be corrected.’

  __________

  The atmosphere in the Red Petunia was subdued. Normally on the night before Midsummer Hallowe’en, the Garden’s most popular pub was thrumming with bonhomie and songs. Now there was a tense quiet, as men, women, trolls, goblins, animals and the occasional vegetable and mineral sipped or gulped at their various drinks.

  ‘A king,’ said Don Cr
emini. ‘A king of the Garden? It’s not right, you know? No-one said “Hey, you with no beard and the stupid red slippers. You be king now.”’

  ‘Don’t think that’s how it works,’ muttered Verno Hefterlink, the pea-herder. ‘Kinging,’ he explained, when everyone looked at him.

  ‘How does it work, then?’ asked Mistress Alloban, from behind the bar.

  ‘Works like this,’ Verno sulked. ‘Some bloke says “I’m king now,” and if people don’t like it, he cuts their ’eads off or... or...’ No-one wanted to think about what had happened to Timmoluk. ‘Summink.’

  Old Tom sat on the bar, drinking his regular thimbleful of ale. He swallowed. He pulled off his hat, scratched his head, and came to a decision. He put his hat back on and stood up, using his shovel as a prop. ‘’t’aint right,’ he declared. ‘I reckon there’s badness afoot ’ere. And I don’t know ’bout none o’ you lot, but I know ’bout me, see? Now I’m only an ’umble spud, right? But I ain’t gonna let this badness go. Timmoluk was a good ol’ lad, far as I know, and I know Harper’s a good lad too. Daft as a brush half the time, but pure-hearted as they come. An’ I ain’t standin’ for it, this ’ere wizard an’ ’is badness. I ain’t askin’ none o’ you to come wi’ me, and we all know I’ll like as not be chipped alive. But there’s standin’ for summat, and not standin’ for summat, an’ that’s my path, I reckon.’

  Nobody said anything for a long, long moment. Some people sipped their drinks, nervously.

  ‘I’m with ya,’ said Verno quietly, gulping down a mouthful of ale as though he couldn’t believe what he’d said.

  Mistress Alloban sniffed. ‘Me an’ all. He was always a good lad was Timmoluk. Can’t be doin’ with this kingin’.’

  ‘Si,’ said Don Cremini quickly. ‘I too. I pledge the lives of my family to this cause, Signor Tom. I do not care for this so-called wizard-king.’

  ‘I’m in,’ said a voice from the corner. Old Tom couldn’t see who it belonged to, but soon it didn’t matter.