Conflagration

by Mick Farren

  Jesamine had finally felt on much safer ground. Slowly and sensuously she rose to her feet. She hadn’t spoken, just smoothly unbuttoned the back of her best blue dress, the one from New York, and allowed it to fall to the floor so she stood naked, but for her jewelry, her high heels, and the velvet choker around her throat. A slow smile had spread across Jack Kennedy’s face, and he had stretched out a hand to her. “Come here, my dear.”

  Jesamine realized that, as she remembered what had just come to pass, she was unconsciously hugging herself. She knew that she must still smell of him. Her hand moved surreptitiously to touch herself, but at that moment someone started hammering on the cabin door.

  CORDELIA

  The too-familiar voice had come out of the cold thin air on the stern on the Ragnar, and whispered sickeningly, as always, maintaining the hollow ring of the torture chamber where Cordelia and Jeakqual-Ahrach had first come face to face with each other. “So Cordelia Blakeney, I understand you have been asking questions about my new creations.”

  Cordelia’s blood turned to ice. “What?”

  She could see nothing, but she knew for certain the disembodied voice was neither madness nor hallucination. A split second earlier, Cordelia had been leaning on the destroyer’s stern rail, trying to resolve her feelings about a possible liaison between Jesamine and Jack Kennedy, but now she was a coiled spring, poised for fight or flight. A tense silence ensued for almost a minute before the voice came again. “Did you think that I couldn’t find you, even in the middle of this great ocean?”

  “Get away from me you old and twisted bitch!”

  “Anger won’t protect you, Cordelia Blakeney. When will you accept that, whatever you do, and whatever powers you might believe you have acquired, you will always be vulnerable to me?”

  “You haven’t been able to get near me in months.”

  “I’m with you now, aren’t I?”

  Cordelia could not deny this. Behind her, the wake of the Ragnar still created its strange luminescence, but she could no longer appreciate it. “I order you to get away from me.”

  “Do you recall the first time we met, Cordelia Blakeney?”

  “How could I forget it, Jeakqual-Ahrach?”

  “You were strung up before me, naked. You and the coffee-colored whore.”

  Cordelia was frightened. She had never imagined that Jeakqual-Ahrach could find her and communicate with her here on the deck of the Norse warship in the dark of night. The knowledge was nothing less than a profound shock, but she did her best not to reveal her fear. “The coffee-colored whore has a name. She is Jesamine.”

  “My black Zhaithan had the two of you hanging from a bar, straining on tiptoe, arms stretched above your heads by the silk ropes around your wrists.”

  “But we escaped you. And now your army has gone down in defeat.”

  “My concern is not with armies.”

  “It was at the time.”

  “Even you should be aware that circumstances change.”

  In that respect, Jeakqual-Ahrach was right. Circumstances had changed. When the Mosul invaders had stood at the borders of Albany, poised to attack and subjugate the kingdom, Jeakqual-Ahrach and her brother, Quadaron-Ahrach, had wielded almost as much power in the Mosul Empire as Hassan IX himself. It was a different kind of power, however. While Hassan might measure his might in military divisions and conquered territories, Jeakqual-Ahrach and Quadaron-Ahrach held sway over the dark forces and nameless menaces of the Other Place, and, through their command and manipulation of the Mosul religion and Quadaron-Ahrach’s control of the Zhaithan, they maintained a vicelike and unrelenting grip on the hearts and minds of enslaved millions.

  Cordelia realized that she was holding on to the rail so hard that her hands hurt. Using all of her breeding and all of her training, she forced herself to relax. She wanted to run, to hide, to find the other three if a fight was to be fought. She was not going to expose her terror to a voice from empty air. “I notice that you don’t show yourself.”

  “You want to see me, Cordelia Blakeney?”

  “Not particularly, Jeakqual-Ahrach. I’m just wondering if you could stretch your power that far.” Cordelia had few doubts that Jeakqual-Ahrach could manifest herself if she so desired. She would never make the mistake of underestimating the power of either Her Grand Eminence or her equally sinister brother, the High Zhaithan. Since the Mosul defeat on the Potomac, much time had been spent assessing the dangerous siblings’ real position within the hierarchy of Hassan’s empire. In Albany, one school of thought reasoned that the military reversals in the Americas could only have brought about an eclipse of their power. Both the High Zhaithan and his sister had visited the Mosul army right before the push across the river, and surely they must have been saddled with some of the responsibility for its failure. This theory was, to a degree, born out by Cordelia’s own experience. In the first weeks The Four had been together, Jeakqual-Ahrach had harassed and harried Cordelia, not only with unbidden voices in her mind, but with actual hallucinations and, on one unpleasant occasion, a startlingly demoralizing sense memory of the brush of silver needles, to which Cordelia’s body had been subjected in the Zhaithan torture chamber. Through the winter and spring, though, a diminishment had occurred. Jeakqual-Ahrach’s last invasion of Cordelia’s mind had been during the early days of their winter training, and Cordelia, weary, but toughened by the rigors of the relentless regimen, had, in a moment of fury, found the angry strength to cast Jeakqual-Ahrach from her with enough force that, up to this present and unwelcome moment, the woman’s manifest, wind-walking presence had not returned. The paranormal attack at Newbury Vale, while seeming intense at the time, had been comparatively ineffective and weakly peripheral to the terrestrial battle. Had it not been for the common dreams about the strange White Twins, Cordelia might have come to believe that Jeakqual-Ahrach and her brother were a spent force, but now, here she was again, seemingly as effective as ever.

  “I’m also wondering why you always choose me for these importunate contacts. Do you believe I’ll be the first to crack?”

  “Quite the reverse, Cordelia Blakeney. I play with you because you are the boldest, the most headstrong. You see yourself as the tip of the spear, and that makes you vulnerable.”

  “You believe I’m vulnerable?”

  Although most of the attention and analysis in Albany had always focused on Quadaron-Ahrach, and even Slide and T’saya paid him the most attention, Cordelia suspected that Jeakqual-Ahrach was, in fact, the stronger and more intriguing of the two. History was filled with males who had used religion to scale the more obscene heights of power as pontiffs or high priests. The High Zhaithan was not especially unique, but his sister was one of a kind, in that she survived, functioned, and enjoyed unquestioning obedience in the violently misogynist world of the Mosul.

  “Entertain your illusions of power, girl. It can all seem very easy, after your first taste of playing the torturer, but, in the end, I will break you. And when you break, your Four will be no more.”

  “You are very confident for one who can’t even show herself.”

  The air in front of Cordelia shimmered. “My voice is not enough?”

  The outline of a human figure appeared, waning for a moment, but then strengthening, until a dream-image of Jeakqual-Ahrach, with a faint background of leaping flames, stood between Cordelia and the ocean. She was, as always, dressed in a black robe, but, as if to assert her femininity, it was lavishly trimmed with red and gold. An embroidered representation of the sacred flame of Ignir and Aksura curled around the entire vertical length of the garment, which was synched at the waist by a gold, ruby-encrusted belt that displayed the curves of her breasts and hips beneath the soft fabric. Cordelia had always found Jeakqual-Ahrach’s age hard to assess. Superficially she seemed to be no older than her early forties, but if she was truly the full sister of Quadaron-Ahrach, that was hardly possible. She had to be far older. History recorded the brother as being in his eight
ies at the very least. Cordelia had, on more than one occasion, wondered if the knives of skilled surgeons had played a part in the staving off of the ravages of mortality, perhaps along with the ministrations of apothecaries, necromancers, and other specialists whose function should not be imagined or guessed at, not in the dark of night.

  “Now you see me, Cordelia Blakeney.”

  “These are still parlor tricks.”

  “You believe so?”

  “You think your disembodied form can hurt me?”

  “I’m just making you aware that I can always find you, wherever you might try to hide.”

  “I’m not hiding.”

  “What do you think you’re doing on this iron ship of the Norsemen?”

  “I’m hardly going to tell you, am I?”

  “The truth is that this ship is bringing you and your three companions nearer to me.”

  “Maybe that’s something that you should be worrying about.”

  “As much as you worry about my new creations?”

  “What new creations, Jeakqual-Ahrach?”

  “You used your whip on the Fourth Adept to find out more about them.”

  Cordelia struck a pose, doing her best to appear cold and cruelly capricious. “Just an amusement, Jeakqual-Ahrach. As you said, a taste of playing the torturer.”

  “And that’s why you gave him to the demon, to Slide?”

  Cordelia did her best not to falter at how much Jeakqual-Ahrach seemed to know. “I will admit I was curious as to why you might be forcing these half-formed images into my dreams. It seemed a little pathetic for one who once fancied herself so powerful.”

  “I have something to show you.”

  Cordelia said nothing.

  “You’re not curious?”

  “What could you show me? You may be very clever at conjuring hollow, insubstantial pictures in the air, but anything you might show me would be nothing more than that.”

  “Observe for yourself, and then tell me.”

  Two smaller and far from distinct figures materialized beside Jeakqual-Ahrach, and then, they, too, grew more substantial. A white- faced boy and an equally pallid girl, identical, and possibly albino, and with huge, unnerving eyes, stood close to Jeakqual-Ahrach. The boy had his arm raised, gripping her robe. He and the girl were dressed in tiny, child-sized versions of Jeakqual-Ahrach’s black Zhaithan cowl. At first, their infant gaze was downcast, but then the White Twins slowly raised their pale blue, inhuman eyes, and stared directly at her. A malign hatred washed over Cordelia. She could not look away from their loathsome infantile gaze. The Twins’ corpse-white lips drew back in baby snarls, baring tiny, but pointed, porcelain teeth, and suddenly Cordelia was scared. In the baleful waves of dire emotion, the children seemed to be growing from just a gossamer vision, taking solid form, and moving into her reality as if they meant to harm her. Cordelia felt paralyzed, and had to summon all of her strength to stop herself screaming.

  ARGO

  Argo woke from a dream. The White Twins had been a part of the dream, and yet they had not actually been in it. Even as he regained the waking world, the memory started to fragment but was replaced by very conscious unease. Near at hand, someone was in grave danger. In the cabin Argo shared with Raphael, he had the top bunk and Raphael had the lower one, but when he swung down to the floor, he found that Raphael’s bunk was empty. Had something happened to him? The dream faded, but the unfocused menace grew stronger. Argo fumbled into his pants and pulled on his boots. His hand went to the handle of the cabin door, but then, acting on a sudden afterthought, he reached for the revolver that hung in its holster from the belt of his dress uniform. On a mission such as they were on, the sidearm was little more than a prop, like the formal swords worn by the Norse naval officers, but that did not mean that it was not loaded and fully functional.

  In pants and shirt, and holding the pistol down by his side, Argo made his way quietly and quickly up to the nearest open deck. He could sense no located emanations that might give him an idea of the threat’s direction, and he hoped that he would be able to see and feel more once he was no longer enclosed in a cabin, corridor, or companionway. A part of him felt that he ought to raise the alarm, but he hesitated while he still had nothing but a bad feeling and the final fragments of monochrome dream. He doubted that the Ragnar’s officers would see either as sufficient reason to place the destroyer and its crew at action stations, and recognized the irony in this. He was only aboard the Ragnar, only being taken to the Norse Union, because he had an ability to sense things that others couldn’t, and yet he would almost certainly find himself ridiculed if he acted on that ability. On deck, the air was clear and chill, and the fear diminished slightly. If he stayed there too long in just his pants and undershirt, he would soon be shivering. He was still wondering what to do next, when a familiar voice with an Hispanian accent cause him quickly to turn.

  “Are you planning an assassination?” Raphael was regarding him with a expression that was both puzzled and amused. Argo shook his head, feeling decidedly awkward. “No, I…”

  “Then why the gun?”

  “Didn’t you feel something?”

  “What kind of something?”

  “I don’t know. It was intense, but kind of vague, like something bad was happening in another part of the ship.”

  Raphael shook his head. “Nothing like that. I just had this need to get out of the cabin. You were sleeping and I’d been reading a book, and then suddenly I felt kinda…” He searched for the right word. “… claustrophobic, and had this overwhelming desire to get out on deck.”

  “So you did feel something?”

  “I suppose you could call it that.”

  They both looked carefully around. Everything about the destroyer was perfectly normal. They could see officers moving in the dim light of the Ragnar’s bridge, and a crewman came out of the wireless shack and went below. Raphael frowned. “You think we should tell someone?”

  “What could we tell them?”

  “Maybe we should check on the girls?”

  Argo nodded. That was a workable idea, in that it was something to do, and would counter the sense of unformed disquiet. “Why don’t we?”

  They hurried through the night interior of the destroyer and knocked discreetly on the door of Cordelia and Jesamine’s quarters. At first they received no reply, and then Jesamine’s cautious voice responded to a second, slightly louder rapping. “Who is it?”

  “Argo and Raphael.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Open the door. It’s nothing we need to shout about.”

  “Hold on.”

  Bolts snapped back and Jesamine peered cautiously out at them. She was wrapped in a sheet as though she had been sleeping, except she had a certain dreamy sated look in her eyes that Argo knew a little too well from the time they had been together. Was someone in the cabin with her? “What’s up?”

  Argo glanced at Raphael before answering her. “I don’t know, but something.”

  Jesamine didn’t seem impressed. “What are you talking about? And what’s the gun for?”

  Argo couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just open the door. “Let us in and we’ll tell you.”

  “Cordelia isn’t here.”

  “Where is she?”

  Jesamine looked annoyed. “How the fuck should I know? Probably with her sailor boy.”

  “Are you alone.”

  Jesamine’s annoyance grew. “If course I’m alone. What’s this all about?”

  “I have a feeling…”

  “What?”

  “I have a feeling that something is wrong.”

  After an instant of reluctance, Jesamine visibly pulled herself together. “What kind of wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Not tangible, but definitely wrong.”

  Jesamine looked to Raphael. “Do you feel the same?”

  “Not as strongly, but I couldn’t sleep.”

  She glared at Argo. “This had bett
er not be bullshit.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Well, since we’re all here, we’d better assume it has something to do with Cordelia.”

  “So where do we find this sailor of hers?”

  “I don’t know?”

  “You’ve never been to his cabin.”

  “I was sick as a dog up until today.”

  “Right.”

  Raphael glanced up and down the corridor outside the cabin, but it was empty. “We’re going to have to find out. Do you know his name?”

  “Bjorn something, I think.” Jesamine thought hard. “A lieutenant. Bjorn … Hawkins…”

  “We’ll have to find an officer and ask.”

  Jesamine looked hard at Argo. “You’d better be right about this feeling, because otherwise Cordelia is going to have a shit fit.”

  CORDELIA

  “Observe the Holy Twins, Cordelia Blakeney. Observe the Gods made flesh. Meet Ignir and Aksura.”