Kindling (Flame of Evil)

by Mick Farren

  “It was no dream, baby.”

  “I was afraid I was losing my wits.”

  Jesamine shook her head. “You are not losing your wits.”

  “I’m glad of that, at least.”

  “You may not be when you hear what I’ve got to say.”

  Cordelia did not like the sound of this at all. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’d better sit up and pay attention, girl, because I am going to pour you just one drink, and, then, as quickly and succinctly as possible, I will tell you everything I know.”

  Cordelia said nothing as Jesamine moved to Phaall’s liquor chest and frowningly held up a bottle. “We need to get away from here before Phaall returns, if for no other reason than he will certainly whip us both bloody when he sees how much of his booze we’ve gone through.”

  “Is there coffee here in the realm of the Mosul?”

  Jesamine searched for glasses. “There is, but we don’t have time for coffee. We’ll have to make do with schnapps.” She found what she was looking for and handed Cordelia a shot of raw spirit, and then Jesamine sat down and told her everything that she knew about T’saya and the Four, the previous experience with T’saya’s rotgut psychedelic, and how she could only think that, in the first odd and illogical affinity they had felt for each other, and then the subsequent conjoining in the night, a first bond was being forged. She went on to repeat all that T’saya had said about the Four, including the crucial fact that it would require the two young men to complete the quartet of power.

  “We are two of the four?

  “Of the Four. That’s what T’saya said, and after all that has happened, I’m not inclined to doubt her.”

  “And that’s where we’re going? To T’saya?”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  Cordelia shook her head. “Right now I don’t have any ideas at all.”

  “So shall we get dressed and go?”

  “To T’saya?”

  “To T’saya.”

  “Last night you said your colonel would protect us.”

  “That was last night.”

  “And now?”

  “If the vision said anything, it’s that we can only rely on ourselves.”

  “And this T’saya?”

  “And T’saya.”

  One other facet of the hallucinations that had yet to be mentioned still disquieted Cordelia. It was the physical bliss that she had apparently derived from the conjoining with Jesamine. Except for a half-grown, schoolgirl crush, a dormitory embrace and some shuddering and heavy breathing, Cordelia had taken her pleasure exclusively from men since she had been of age, but her experience with the honey-skinned girl, who was right then squirming into a shapeless cotton kaftan suitable for the outer world, had turned all that on its head. “Jesamine?”

  “What?”

  “Are we lesbians?”

  Jesamine smoothed out her kaftan and then leaned over and kissed Cordelia on the forehead. “No, girl, I don’t think we’re lesbians. We may, in fact, be something far more dangerous to these bastards than lesbians.”

  RAPHAEL

  Reveille had come and gone and daylight was on them. Raphael and Pascal walked through the camp, rifles over their shoulders, doing their best to look like two grunts going about their routine and fully authorized business and not the frightened AWOL recruits they really were. Just after reveille had sounded they had come upon a formation of Mosul footsloggers, in the worn greatcoats of veterans, paraded in dressed lines for a company punishment. The unfortunate victim was stripped to his long johns and strapped by his wrists and ankles, and a leather belt around his waist, to a tall iron tripod that both boys knew was specifically designed to hold a prisoner immobile while he suffered a military flogging, branding, or mutilation. In this case, the sentence of the drumhead court-martial being meted out was a simple flogging, fifty lashes, as they would learn later, delivered with a cat-o’-nine-tails, with small steel studs inserted in each of the thongs of the implement, and, although this was one of the milder disciplines inflicted on Mosul troops in the field, the chance remained that the recipient might not live through it. Raphael and Pascal had arrived on the scene after the punishment had already commenced. A lieutenant delivered a slow count while a burly underofficer, tunic off and shirt sleeves rolled to reveal hairy, muscular arms, swung the fearsome whip.

  “Twenty-one!”

  Blood was running down the prisoner’s bare back from the whip’s deep and horizontal lacerations, and it had already soaked into the off white undergarment. A leather gag was thrust into the man’s mouth so he could utter no sound except a muffled grunting gasp as each blow fell. His body twisted but was held fast by the tightly buckled restraints.

  “Twenty-two!”

  A second man, also half-dressed, and confined in a wooden yoke, knelt white-faced and watching, waiting to be the next up on the cruel device. The tradition in the Mosul ranks was that, in such a case, the most guilty of the pair was the one who waited, so he could watch and imagine his own coming pain as his accomplice suffered. Pascal grasped Raphael by the arm. Both boys had felt the cut of the cane at the training camp across the ocean and seen it applied to others, but that had been nothing like what they were now witnessing. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Twenty-three!”

  Raphael nodded, but he could not resist turning to another gawker who had stopped to watch from behind the formally assembled ranks of the victims’ own company. “What did the two of them do?”

  The man just shrugged. He did not know and seemed not to care, but another bystander volunteered the information. “AWOL and thievery, from what I heard when the charges were read.”

  “Twenty-four!”

  Now Pascal looked even more unhappy. As yet they had not stolen anything, unless their rifles counted as purloined official property, but they were definitely AWOL and had been since Melchior had presumably called the roll once the squad fell in after being roused by reveille. Raphael knew that Pascal was imagining himself bound to the triangular frame with the strip of leather clenched between his teeth, and he was all but doing the same himself.

  “Twenty-five!”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  They moved on as slowly as they could, not wishing to attract attention to themselves, but, as soon as they were away on their own, out of earshot of any eavesdropper, Pascal turned and faced Raphael, wide-eyed and close to panic. “We could go back. Melchior would understand. The worst we’ll get is just a beating if we get back now.”

  Raphael looked bleakly at Pascal. First the damned fool had demanded to come with him, and now he was losing his nerve. Sure it was traumatic to walk without warning into a public flogging, but surely that was all the more reason to run from the Mosul and all they stood for. “Just a beating? You think so? You saw that poor bastard.”

  “They wouldn’t do that to us.”

  “This is the front, boy.”

  Pascal’s eyes grew wider still. “I should never have come with you.”

  Raphael snapped back angrily. “Did I ask you to come with me?”

  “Why did you decide to run at all? Back on the road you told me that there was nowhere to go.”

  Raphael was not about to tell Pascal that he had deserted to look for two women he had seen in a dream, and then once briefly in the flesh, but, mercifully, he found that he did not have to. The conversation had taken them as far as a particularly muddy intersection where a new commotion was attracting attention. Where the flogging had been an ordered and largely silent affair, with the only sounds being the officer calling off the strokes, the hiss and crack of the whip, the gasps of the victim, and low-voiced conversations among those observers in the rear of the ranks, this was a shouting, chaotic, almost slapstick spectacle. A slipping, straining team of eight mules slithered and brayed as a gun crew beat on their backs, trying to make the protesting animals drag a six-inch howitzer with huge iron wheels through the sucking, man-made
mire. A fuming, red-faced artillery officer was busily enlisting every able-bodied onlooker either to get his back under the gun carriage and push or to help turn the spokes of the great wheels, and it was only a matter of moments before he spotted Raphael and Pascal as likely candidates.

  “You two, get over here.”

  The last thing Raphael wanted was any contact with an officer, and he quickly reacted with imbecilic surprise. “Us?”

  “Yes, you, damn your eyes!”

  “But we have orders, sir.”

  “Fuck your orders. Get on that wheel and lend a hand.”

  Faced with no choice, the two of them stepped down from the wooden sidewalk and into the mud to join the men laboring to move the massive fieldpiece. An angry underofficer shoved Pascal bodily to join the men pushing from behind, while Raphael was ordered to the nearest wheel. To be down in the mud, hungry and breaking his back, was hardly what Raphael wanted, but, on the positive side, he was separated from Pascal and his frightened complaining, and also, for the moment, completely anonymous. As he hauled on one of the thick iron spokes, he glanced at the man next to him. “What’s going on here?”

  “They’re moving the guns up to the forward positions.”

  Raphael looked back the way the gun must have come. Two more of the big cannons and two more teams of mules were waiting until the first gun had cleared the deep mud of the intersection before they ventured into the quagmire. “Does this mean the attack is going to happen for sure?”

  The man looked at Raphael as though he must be a complete idiot. “Haven’t you heard? Hassan himself, may his name be blessed, has landed in Savannah. He will be here sometime tonight.”

  ARGO

  Slide shook his head. “Hassan isn’t coming here.”

  Argo frowned. “Then why are they all saying it? That’s all we’re hearing.”

  “By any realistic calculation, Hassan IX is over a hundred years old.”

  “What?”

  Slide seemed to enjoy delivering these tidbits of shock. “That’s right, kid. It’s just another of those things that’s never mentioned in the world of the Mosul.”

  Argo could only fall back on a well-used admission. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’ll be a double, boy. One of maybe a dozen.”

  “But how is that possible?”

  “How is what possible?”

  “That no one puts two and two together and figures out that doubles are being used whenever the emperor makes a public appearance?”

  “Did anyone you know put two and two together?”

  “But that was Thakenham. We knew absolutely nothing.”

  “You think there are other, more enlightened and informed parts of the Mosul Empire where truth and sophistication are the order of the day and the minds of its subjects are not ordered and controlled by the Zhaithan and the Ministry of Virtue?”

  Argo considered this. “I suppose not.”

  “Our best information is that Hassan himself goes nowhere and sees no one, except an inner circle of his closest advisors, his most trusted generals, and his seventeen sons.”

  “He has seventeen sons?”

  “The real number is closer to fifty, but a lot have been executed over the years, usually after they’ve taken it into their heads to hurry along their inheritance by plotting to overthrow the old man. The story goes, and I tend to believe it, that now only magick, medication, and blood transfusions keep the blessed emperor alive.”

  Argo and Slide were now deep in the Mosul camp, but, on their tall thoroughbred horses, and dressed in their stolen Zhaithan uniforms, no one so much as looked at them, let alone questioned what they might be doing. Fear of the Zhaithan was so complete that no one in the camp had even questioned the small anomalous details that might have given the two of them away. They had no need to worry that their faces did not fit. The chain mail that hung from their stolen helmets hid them from all observers. That the uniforms were less than a perfect fit was also no problem. All lack of tailoring was covered by the voluminous black riding cloaks, as were Slide’s two highly unorthodox pistols. Keeping their old clothes also proved no problem. The Zhaithan saddles came complete with saddlebags with plenty of capacity to hold their bundled garments. Rather more risky was that Slide would not give up his oriental sword, and Argo was equally reluctant to jettison the Norse carbine given him by the Rangers. It was, after all, a prize weapon and a dead man’s gun. Thus, the sword hung from Slide’s saddle in place of the dead Zhaithan’s saber and the carbine was laid across the pommel of Argo’s saddle.

  While turning out the saddlebags to make room for their things, Slide and Argo had made what was, for Argo at least, a very pleasing discovery. The two Zhaithan had been well supplied with food and drink for whatever journey they had been making. Bread, sausage, and smoked meats were packaged in greaseproof paper, and these were accompanied by two quart bottles of robust Teuton beer, a corked jug of a dark wine that was good if overly resinous, and a box of American cigars. Apparently the Zhaithan’s religious piety did not preclude an indulgence in creature comforts, and, once they were far enough away from the bridge that had been the scene of the double slaying, Argo, who seemed to have been hungry for most of the days since he had left Thakenham, had made himself what was an extremely satisfying picnic, while Slide, who appeared to only eat as a social requirement, but had a need to drink and smoke that was both definite and infinite, went straight for the wine and cigars, judging the latter acceptable and the former good if too Hellenic, a word that Argo had never heard before.

  As they continued to ride deeper into the camp, Argo thought that Slide had concluded the lecture, but apparently he had not. “Back in another place and another time, I was involved in an assassination attempt on that old bastard.”

  Argo could hardly believe what he was hearing. Some of his Thakenham conditioning that Hassan was near-divine and unassailable still lingered. “You personally took a shot at the Emperor? How was that possible?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “But you did it?”

  “Well, to tell the exact truth, I didn’t fire the gun. The actual shooters were two guys called Harrelson and Lee Oswald. The plan was to kill him during a state visit to a city called Sarajevo.”

  “And they missed him?”

  “Oh, no, they didn’t miss him. In fact, it was a hell of a piece of shooting, considering the Immortals were all round him, covering him from every angle. Oswald hit him in the small of the back, and Harrelson nailed him clean with a headshot that lifted a section of his skull and blew away half of his brain in a bloody pink cloud. All in front of maybe ten thousand people. The man was dead before he hit the floor of the carriage, but then we found out that the man wasn’t really Hassan.”

  “How was that kept quiet?

  “It wasn’t. Another Hassan was on television within forty-eight hours, proving that the wound had only been superficial.

  Argo was mystified. First “Hellenic” and now television. “Television? What’s television?”

  “Something from another place that you’d best not worry about, Argo Weaver.”

  Slide winced and shifted in his saddle. Although he hadn’t admitted it since he had smoked Hooker’s opium, Argo suspected that the Mosul wound still caused him some demonic version of pain, but, pain or no pain, it did not stop Slide dropping these tantalizing hints of other worlds beyond the one they currently inhabited.

  “So what should I worry about?”

  “If I was you, Weaver, I’d be worrying whether Quadaron-Ahrach will be part of this display of encouragement for the troops.”

  Argo frowned. “Is that likely? I mean, would they really risk sending the High Zhaithan across the ocean and into a war zone? Even in Thakenham we knew that he was extremely ancient and had lived far in excess of any normal human lifespan.”

  “You’re learning to think more like a tactician.”

  “And less like a bumpkin?”

 
Slide smiled. “I didn’t say that.”

  “But really, he wouldn’t be sent here, would he?”

  “Quadaron-Ahrach isn’t sent anywhere. If he comes here, it will be of his own accord and by his own decision and not because of any order from the emperor. And if he comes here, it won’t be for such a mundane purpose as merely encouraging the troops for an assault on Albany, but because he senses there’s a threat to his power here in the Americas, a threat of which you and I may very well be a part.”

  And there ended the lesson, leaving Argo with considerably more to worry about than when he’d asked his first simple question about how the Mosul camp seemed to be buzzing with rumors of Hassan’s impending arrival. Worry, hunger, and sleeplessness had become Argo’s constant companions since he escaped into his new life, but, bit by bit, he felt as though he was learning to deal with the three attendant miseries. He now took food and sleep when and where they presented themselves, and he attempted to counteract the nagging of worry by reminding himself, not always successfully, that the unexpected constantly lay in wait, and that for him to predict or anticipate the worst would only serve to drive himself crazy. He had managed to doze for a while on the ride to the camp, but then they had begun to encounter patrols and checkpoints, and he had been forced to remain fully awake and with his wits about him. Once more he learned the lesson of how pointless it was to dwell on possible and potential dangers. He had, for example, considered the infiltration of the Mosul camp a near impossibility, but then, out of the blue, he and Slide had stumbled across the pair of Zhaithan committing aquatic sodomy under the bridge, and their problem had been solved. His next fear had been that his impersonation of one of the Zhaithan elite would be so implausible that he and Slide would be stopped and arrested at the first roadblock, but that had been proved equally groundless as they were hastily waved through, not only by Mosul guards and military police, but even rank-and-file Zhaithan, without so much as a demand for them to show papers, passes, or authorization of any kind.