The thought seemed so natural that she chilled.
There was a beam of blue light pooled on the floor. She couldn’t see where it was coming from. The thing beside her crawled into her mind and fondled the surface of her brain.
‘I’m Black John,’ it told her silently. ‘Let’s walk together to the light.’
That was just what they should do, of course. She took a small step forward, then another. Henry was watching her. His eyes were closed to slits and he was smiling.
Blue tried to remember what Pyrgus had told her about being possessed by the demons. When it happened to him he’d tried hard not to think of his name, because once they knew your name, they had total control. Fat lot of good that information was. They knew her name already. Queen Blue, Empress of the Faerie Realm. Now walking like a child into a pool of light.
It occurred to her that this was not the time to resist them. They were actively controlling her, making her walk. Later, perhaps, when their attention was on something else, she might seize an opportunity to escape.
Hand in hand with Black John, Blue walked forward.
Fifty-five
Blue was drawn elegantly along the beam. Such strange spell technology. There was nothing like it in the Realm. It made you so relaxed and dreamy, carried you so gently, up and up and up.
She reached the wall of the cubical chamber and passed through it as if it were mist. All the while Black John’s little cat-claw hand held hers.
The sudden glare blinded her and hurt her eyes. She gasped and jerked her hand away. At once Black John gripped her mind savagely and she stood stock-still, unable to move, unable even to close her eyes. Black John took her hand again and her paralysis broke.
Blue stood blinking tears from her eyes. She felt icy calm. The incident had taken less than a second, but she’d learned something. While the demon creature held her hand, he could control her actions gently. When she jerked her hand away, his response had been close to panic. Locking up her mind and body was an overreaction. He still had control, but it was a crude, brutal control.
Blue forced herself to ignore the pain in her eyes and think. The problem was nobody really knew much about demonic possession. Faeries of the Night had techniques and spells to guard against it, but even they didn’t know exactly how it worked. Henry was under demon control, obviously had been for some time, and nobody was touching him. Mr Fogarty had been possessed by a demon when he killed her father, but none of the creatures had been with him – touching him – at the time. Why did this thing need to touch her now? Henry and Mr Fogarty were both human. Perhaps it was different for faeries.
She wracked her memory to recall what exactly had happened to Pyrgus. He said the demons had jumped on him, so there’d been contact then. But had one held his hand after that? He hadn’t mentioned it, although that didn’t mean it didn’t happen. Besides, Pyrgus had been possessed while he was in Hael – the demons’ own world. It might work differently in Hael too.
No matter. She still thought she’d learned something. Here and now, the demons seemed to need contact to control her properly. That was knowledge she might use.
Blue turned her head, blinking the tears from her eyes. Her surroundings swam slowly into focus. She was in a strange metal chamber, lit by a pervasive violet glow. As her eyes adjusted, she could see the light was coming from a bank of huge transparent tubes, filled with slowly bubbling liquid. Floating inside were scores of naked babies, mouths open, eyes tight shut. To her sudden horror, she realised they were breathing the liquid. There was no way she could tell whether the babies were faerie or human.
‘Neither,’ Henry said, reading her mind. He was floating through the wall on another beam of blue light. Two of the black-eyed grey demons were following behind him. All three landed like thistledown.
When she looked at Henry, she was no longer looking at Henry. She knew that now. There was something else behind his eyes.
‘What are they, then?’ she asked angrily.
‘Hybrids,’ Henry said. ‘Part of our breeding programme.’
Our breeding programme? The creature speaking through Henry was a demon. Keep it talking. Talk might distract it. Besides, any information could prove useful.
‘Your breeding programme?’ Blue echoed.
The thing dropped all pretence of being Henry now. Even the voice changed, dropping to a low growl that sounded even more frightening for coming from a boy’s mouth. ‘For stronger stock,’ it said. Henry looked at her with cold, blank eyes.
Blue looked back at the babies floating in the tubes. Some were plump, some looked pale and sickly. All moved slowly in the liquid. Their hands opened and closed. A horrid realisation dawned on her.
‘Those are –’
‘Part Analogue, part Hael,’ the demon said. Henry’s eyes stared at her. ‘Now we begin the second phase.’
The silence was so profound it was as if all sound had been sucked from the room. A sick fear rose in her stomach. She was afraid to ask but had to ask. Her voice sounded hoarse, scarcely louder than a whisper.
‘What’s the second phase?’
The thing inside Henry contorted his lips into a smile. ‘A child of Hael born of a faerie mother.’ His eyes flickered to Black John, who squeezed her hand.
Blue tried to pull away and scream, but the paralysis fell on her again.
Fifty-six
Life was always so very difficult without Kitterick. Madame Cardui picked up Lanceline and stroked her translucent fur. The thing was, when one reached a certain age, one’s faculties atrophied. A little pain here, a little ache there … nothing that one couldn’t cope with, of course, especially now they’d developed those marvellous rejuvenation patches. But the woolly-mindedness was a different matter. There wasn’t a spell in the Realm would touch that. Which was why Kitterick was such a boon. Astonishing storage capacity. Lists … records … things to do … old photograms … new plans … he absorbed them all. Honestly, you’d imagine his poor head would burst. But no, in it all went and out it all came at exactly the right moment. Remarkable. Even for a Trinian. She would be quite lost without him. She was quite lost without him. But Pyrgus’s needs took priority.
Pyrgus. Such a bright young man. And so misguided, as young men often were. This involvement with a Faerie of the Night, for example. Quite dreadful. Alan was right, of course – the lure of the exotic. Forbidden fruit. Young men never thought of much else (except animals in Pyrgus’s case, which was quite odd). She sighed as the ouklo pulled to a halt. She’d been just as bad herself when she was younger. How Daddy squirmed when she told him about the Great Myphisto. A stage career had seemed such a scandal in those days. And Myphisto was so much older than she was.
She stepped down from the carriage and tapped the side to send it on its way. She was sure she should have emulated Alan and stayed in the palace for the duration of the emergency. But honestly, one craved one’s own bed in times of crisis. One’s own bed and one’s own home.
‘I shall find you some minced mouse when we get in,’ she promised Lanceline as she climbed the narrow staircase. The cat (who understood everything, absolutely everything, she said) began to purr.
Her Guardian triggered on the landing and she waved it away impatiently. Quite hideous how life had to be surrounded by so much security these days. She was quite sure things hadn’t been nearly so bad when she was young. But, of course, when she was young she hadn’t been involved in espionage. An occupation that brought its own risks. She sighed again as she reached the door of her apartment.
Lanceline growled softly.
Madame Cardui froze with her hand on the door. ‘What is it, darling?’ she asked.
Lanceline growled again.
With the cat still cradled in her arms, Madame Cardui retraced her steps and reactivated the Guardian.
‘Report,’ she demanded.
‘Full or synopsis?’ the creature asked.
‘Synopsis.’
‘Authorisati
on?’
‘Codeword: Painted Lady.’
The Guardian placed his right hand on his turban. ‘Accessing …’ Then, ‘No visitors, Madame Cardui. No attempted access. No incidents, no accidents. Safeguards intact. Securities intact. No repairs necessary. Last system initialisation, twenty-two hundred hours. Situation normal. Shall I reset, Madame Cardui?’
‘No,’ Madame Cardui said absently as she turned back to the stairs. As she reached her door, Lanceline moved uneasily in her arms.
‘It’s all right, darling,’ Madame Cardui told her.
Spell-driven securities were all very well, but even the most sophisticated system could be circumvented if one had enough resources. But Alan (dear Alan!) had taught her one very special trick – new to the Realm, although he claimed spies often used it in the Analogue World. She crouched down and felt for the invisible thread she’d stretched across the bottom of the door. It was intact. No one had come in this way.
Madame Cardui opened the door.
The apartment was in darkness. ‘Lights,’ she commanded. All systems activated at once, sending elaborate spell patterns crawling across the walls, switching on the soothing music, bringing up the soft pink lighting she favoured.
The killer was waiting for her in the middle of her living quarters.
He was dressed in black from head to toe and wore the dark glasses of a Faerie of the Night. Wrapped around his forehead was a sweatband bearing the insignia of the Assassins’ Guild. Like most assassins, he was small and wiry, but he carried Halek daggers in each hand. He had been waiting – heavens only knows how long – in the Death Crouch, preparing for the moment she returned.
‘Fang,’ whispered Madame Cardui.
Lanceline launched from her arms in a blur of light. She hit the assassin at the level of his knee and streaked up his body to his face, attacking with all four paws simultaneously. The lenses flew across the room and he screamed in shock as she shredded his eyes. Then she went for the artery in his throat.
As the corpse lay twitching on the floor, Lanceline walked daintily away to leap back into Madame Cardui’s arms.
‘Minced mouse,’ she murmured sensuously.
Fifty-seven
The pass was working! Pyrgus hadn’t really dared to believe it, but he’d been stopped by three different sets of guards now and each time he’d produced it, they’d waved him on with bows and smiles. Amazing the cultural differences with Haleklind. You’d never catch a Faerie of the Light letting a total stranger wander freely through his home, nor a Faerie of the Night, that was for sure.
Although it wasn’t exactly freely, of course. Some doors were locked. The door to Ogyris’s office, for example, and the door to Ogyris’s private study. In fact, quite a few doors were locked. You could wave the pass at them as much as you liked, but they stayed firmly shut. No question of breaking in either, with guards likely to turn up at any moment. He might be allowed to go anywhere, but no pass gave him burglary rights. Which was a pity. There might have been interesting documents in the office or the study.
Still, no complaints. Kitterick was proving worth his weight in gold. The pass allowed Pyrgus to come and go as he pleased, which meant he could go outside and take a really close look at the glasshouse. He’d worry about getting into it when he reached it.
Pyrgus strode out the front door, waving his pass at the portraits of Ogyris ancestors on the hallway walls.
He found the glasshouse easily enough. It was now fully dark outside and the building was illuminated as it had been on his first visit. He remembered Gela’s comment that her father relied on magical protections rather than draw attention by posting guards, but even so he was cautious. He waited minutes, listening, before he approached too closely.
Nothing had changed. The crystal flowers were still inside, planted in neat rows. He peered through the glass (taking great care not to touch it), unable to believe they were living plants. But they still seemed beyond the skill of an artist. Every bloom was absolutely perfect, every crystal leaf and stem was a marvel in its own right. Each flower glowed softly underneath the growglobes. Starlight reflected in their depths.
He was wasting time. Poetic musings wouldn’t get Blue back. He needed to know more about these flowers, and Gela said they were spell-protected.
Pyrgus stood trying to remember exactly what she said, and at the same time trying to figure out what spells he would use to protect something really precious. Since money was no object with Merchant Ogyris, you could be sure they’d be heavy-duty magic. And since the flowers were very special the chances were the protections would involve lethal force.
It would have to start with the glass. He was fairly sure that’s what Gela had told him as well. Keep away from the glass, she’d said, or words to that effect. She thought the glass was dangerous. Pyrgus thought the glass was dangerous.
An idea struck him and he began to circle the glasshouse, carefully examining the ground. Sure enough, when you looked closely, the grass hid the remains of insects in huge numbers and he came across the bodies of several dead birds with burn marks on their feathers. That made a lot of sense if his theory was right. Anything that flew into the glass was incinerated.
Which meant it had some sort of high-energy coating.
Pyrgus felt a sudden chill. You could short-circuit a high-energy coating with a Halek knife.
It was hideously dangerous, of course. Halek knives sometimes shattered when you used them, sending their energies back up your arm to stop your heart. (The reason they were more often used to threaten than to kill.) But a soldier once told him that if you used a Halek on an object with a spell charge, the chances of its shattering rose as high as one in three. Only lunatics used Haleks on an object with a spell charge.
But that sort of thinking wouldn’t get Blue back and stop a civil war.
Pyrgus drew his Halek knife. The fine-wrought blue crystal blade reflected back the light from the glasshouse. Would it shatter, if he used it on the glass? One chance in three, the soldier said.
Pyrgus hesitated. What if he used it and it only broke through a single pane? That could easily happen if each one was coated individually. Some panes were large enough for him to squeeze through, but many of them weren’t. He’d have to pick his target carefully – he certainly wasn’t going to risk using his Halek blade more than once.
He circled the building again, paying close attention to its structure this time. Then he circled it again and stopped in front of the entrance door. It was constructed of one large pane and several smaller. He could squeeze through the large pane provided it shattered entirely. But the thing was, if only part of it broke he might still be able to reach through and open the door from the inside. It was very unlikely that Merchant Ogyris would have ordered interior coatings. The point was to keep people out, not threaten anybody who happened to be working inside.
Pyrgus licked his lips and tapped the blade absently against the palm of his left hand. Did he have the courage to do this? He could feel the tingle of the trapped forces as they writhed beneath the surface. One chance in three that he was seconds away from death.
He thought of Blue and stabbed the glass.
The result was astounding. Magical energies surged from the blade, but the blade itself did not break. (It didn’t break! Yes! Thank you, Powers of Light!) The pane cracked loudly, then fell in a tinkling heap at his feet. But before he could move, cracks were spidering across every surface of the building. Pane after pane shattered, sending shards tumbling. The snapping sounds grew louder. The cracks spread further and further. Huge plates of glass fell forward to smash into the growing heap of fragments on the ground. Whole panes fell out intact, then broke as they hit. In seconds, Pyrgus was surrounded by a tempest of broken glass. The noise was mind-numbing.
‘Whoops,’ Pyrgus murmured.
He was standing beside the naked skeleton of a glasshouse. Not one single pane survived intact. There was no way the noise could have gone unnoticed. He
had minutes at best to do what was needed. After that, the guards were here for sure.
Pyrgus sheathed his blade and stepped through the empty doorway, his shoes crunching on the broken glass. The growglobes had survived, strung high above from the framework of the building. There was broken glass inside but the crystal flowers seemed miraculously intact.
He glanced around guiltily. It was a total mess. He was in so much trouble now. With Merchant Ogyris. With Gela. Probably with half the Realm. The destruction was unreal!
But no time to worry about that. Close up he could see Gela was right – the flowers were living things. Their stems were planted in rich earth with a new-fangled thread system providing nourishment and moisture. Some of them even had small shoots sprouting at the base.
He still had no idea what they were and precious little time to find out.
He’d already risked so much now that any other risk seemed small. He reached out, snapped the stem of the nearest flower and dropped it into his pocket. He’d never find the secret of the flowers here. His only hope was to carry some away and investigate them later, hopefully with some help from people who knew more about all this than he did.
He was reaching for another crystal bloom when the guards fell on him like a tree.
Fifty-eight
Pyrgus fought like a fury. But guards were racing in from all directions until he was surrounded by a milling mass of close on a hundred. Even if he’d used the Halek blade again he’d never have broken out. In moments he was on the ground, wrestled down by the weight of bodies.
‘Hold him, boys!’ a coarse voice ordered.
Ruler of the Realm Page 17
