by Mick Farren
“Names?”
“Jesamine.”
“Cordelia.”
“Status?
“Concubine.”
“Concubine.”
“Owner?”
“Colonel Phaall, 4th Teuton Engineers.”
“Colonel Phaall, 4th Teuton Engineers.”
“He owns both of you?”
This time Jesamine made no joke, and the Zhaithan who was doing the talking continued. “The bottle found on you is suspected of being a proscribed psychotropic, the use of which constitutes heresy. Thus you are detained on suspicion of wanton psychedelia, necromancy, and wandering abroad. You will come with us.” He turned to the MPs. “Shackle them.”
As the MPs snapped on the indicated shackles that the Zhaithan had thoughtfully brought with them, Cordelia felt sick, numb, momentarily mindless. Again she whispered urgently to Jesamine. “Has this made us part of the show on the gallows?”
The Zhaithan who had done the talking heard her and struck her sharply across the shoulders with his cane. “Keep your mouth shut, whore. You’ll be told when to talk.”
SIX
ARGO
The sound of drums consumed the whole of the vast Mosul camp, and at regular intervals strange ululations split the air. Formations of men were marched into place. Lines of lurid torches burned, and black flags with the red flame device fluttered on the night wind that blew from off the sluggishly moving river. Massed ranks of Mosul, Mamaluke, and Teutons, buttoned, burnished, and shined in their best dress uniforms, formed the human demarcation of a central avenue by which Hassan IX, or, if Yancey Slide was to be believed, the man who was supposed to be Hassan IX but wasn’t, would enter from the south end of the camp, cross the parade ground, and proceed to the special and sumptuous pavilion that had been erected and prepared for him, and to the podium in front from which he would address—or at least show himself to—the mustered assembly of his military might in the Americas. To one side of this processional approach route stood the tall and now fully completed Ziggurat, with its soon-to-be-incinerated human sacrifices already chained in place, while, on the other, stood the gallows, its platform so far empty but with more than enough condemned waiting below, in the shadows of the scaffold, to put on a show.
The entry of their lord and emperor was being deliberately promoted to impress, and no device of grand, open-air theatre was being spared in the effort to convince the massed legions of the Mosul Empire that the presence of Hassan in their midst, even though Yancey Slide might condemn him as a double, was nothing short of a guarantee of victory and their ultimate domination of the Americas. The immoderate display might seem excessive to an outsider, but this was a culture had been co-opted by military regimentation and a military religion and totally distorted to serve only their specific purposes. The precise lines and coordinated curves of the close order drill squads with the flaming, smoking torches, directed by the unmistakable parade ground scream of Mamaluke underofficers, set the mood of a powerful, harnessed atavism, and, when the Ziggurat was finally torched, it would be totally clear that while Hassan IX might head an empire, whether he headed a civilization was highly debatable. The Mamalukes provided the spearhead for the lavish martial spectacle. First came the braying trumpeters, the precision torchbearers, and the supertall infantrymen who carried the burning lion standards and the red, green, and gold ensigns of their crack divisions. They were followed by the cream of the Mosul Old Guard in dress green and conical sheepskin marfouds, performing a slow goose step with fixed bayonets and rigid spines. The Old Guard did not have the height of the Mamaluke infantry, but they were, at the very least, equal in their unswerving and unquestioning determination.
It was left to the cavalry to bring both pomp and dash to the already implacable circumstance. First the Teuton uhlans, with their heavy chargers nodding and high-stepping, their plumed shakos bobbing, and their drawn sabers gleaming, held at a uniformly perfect vertical, followed the Old Guard at a reined-in walk. The Mamaluke lancers that came next swirled their pristine capes and kept their mounts in careful check as some seemed willing to spook at the pair of lumbering, steam-driven battle tanks that entered the parade ground immediately behind them. The tanks caused something of a lull in the ceremonial entry of the emperor. The unwieldy machines took a few minutes to maneuver on their huge, iron-spiked wheels into their designated places beside the reviewing podium from which Hassan would face his army, display himself to them in his armored glory and reaffirm the time-honored promise of hallowed butchery and sanctioned pillage. These mechanical steamers had to reverse and then grind forward a number of times until they stood positioned, not only for maximum effect but also so their side-mounted gun turrets commanded a wide killing ground should the need and eventuality for defensive slaughter arise.
Hassan’s Immortals entered with the full knowledge that they and they alone were the cream of the elite, the life-guards of the sovereign. The horsemen were all well over six feet tall, and their grey mounts were all bred from the same bloodline. Huge, gold-plated scimitars glittered in the firelight, and the pounding of the mounted kettle drummers, with lionskins over their uniforms, forced the rhythm of urgency onto all the other drums throughout the camp. Compared to the precise geometry of the Teuton riders and the more flamboyant prancing of the Mamalukes, the Immortals were close to disorderly. Their skill as both swordsmen and horsemen was unquestionable, but their concept of formation was free-form and fluid. They would move in and out of each other’s, paths, deftly spinning their sabers as they swerved and maneuvered. They would trot forward and then halt and hold back. Their constant and seemingly random configurations made no sense until Argo took into account that Hassan himself rode in the middle of them. The wide, whirling blades and the complete unpredictability of those who surrounded him made any kind of organized attack very difficult. Argo recalled the story that Slide had told of the two assassins Harrelson and Oswald. The Immortals were a constant distraction around their lord that would confound any lone marksman or team of assassins, and they allowed no visible vulnerability to remain open to a sudden and surprise attack.
At the focus of all this protection, Hassan sat calmly astride his own mount, a tall, thoroughbred Uzbekian that was black as night, but he was hard to see with any clarity considering that he was, right then, the center of attention for close to a quarter of a million armed men, and, in a broader sense, the absolute ruler of most of the known world. By all expectations he should have dominated the vast gathering, but, in reality, he remained hidden. In the brief glimpses Argo had between the effective interference of the flashing swords and the deliberately milling Immortals who wielded them, he could see that Hassan, or his double, was a very tall, very slender figure arrayed in surprisingly unadorned but mirror-polished full-body black armor and an almost all-concealing cape with a flame design running up from the hem. The only concession to Hassan’s imperial power was a cold coronet of stylized flames that circled the brow of his gleaming black helmet. He rode like a man no older than forty, and, for Argo, this made Slide’s contention that he was a substituted double far easier to believe. Even in Thakenham, they knew that Hassan IX was not a young man.
Every so often, the darkly shining figure would nod or slowly raise a hand. The gesture was not that of one who was happy to be among his warriors, it was simply the acknowledgment that his power was being duly recognized. This seemed enough, however, to drive his followers into a frenzy, and a cry of baying welcome went up from the legions.
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
The guttural but coordinated shout did not remain confined to the parade ground, but rapidly spread to all other parts of the camp. Argo could scarcely repress a shudder. The drumming and the shouting were transcending the routine horror and day-to-day tyranny of the Mosul and tapping into what felt like a reserve of primitive dread, a place of ancient darkness where fountains of old and prima
l evil could still be tapped and used. Argo’s newly developed senses could detect a rumbling from somewhere deep in the earth, as though the long dead of previous battles were actually moving. A wordless terror wormed through his nervous system, and he knew that he was being pushed towards the brink of an unreasoning panic with no newly learned skill to resist or counter the fear. Then Slide laid a steadying hand upon his shoulder. “Easy now, Weaver. It’s just the Zhaithan rattling their oldest magick and delving for the primordial warrior frenzy. Don’t let it get to you. It’s largely an illusion.”
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
When T’saya had, on the spur of the moment, designated the parade ground as an easy rendezvous point for the as yet unknown and unnamed boy who was the last of the Four, it had been a unknowing but grievous error. The parade ground had just seemed a large and obvious landmark that even a raw recruit could find. None of them had known that Hassan would be reviewing his troops in martial ceremony the same night in the selfsame location, and Argo could easily have started believing that the arrival of Hassan IX, real or fake, had caused some invisible miasma of foul fortune to settle on the camp, because from that point on, nothing had gone as they had hoped. They had made their way to Phaall’s quarters, with T’saya walking between the horses while Slide and Argo rode, still unchallenged in their High Zhaithan disguises, but they had found no sign of the concubine Jesamine or the Lady Blakeney. They had attempted to question soldiers and servants in the vicinity, but these underlings’ mortal fear of the two supposed priests-militant prevented any but the most vague and nebulous information from being forthcoming. The most the three of them had been able to learn was that the two women had left Phaall’s quarters a few hours earlier, dressed and veiled for the outside world. At that point Slide, T’saya, and Argo were faced with a choice. T’saya had suggested that perhaps the two women had gone to see her, and their paths had unknowingly crossed. Slide conceded that had a certain logic but was unwilling to backtrack. “When they find you gone, they might wait for a while, but they’ll be nervous and wanting to keep on the move.”
T’saya nodded. “Then we should continue to the parade ground and see if you, Weaver, can find the other boy in the midst of all the ugly hoopla that’s going to be building there with the setting of the sun.”
Right then, Argo had offered to see if he could sense the two girls, but again he could find no trace of them. T’saya had made disparaging noises at the inadequacy of male inner vision, but Slide had surprisingly sprung to his defense. “When the time comes, he’ll do what’s needed of him. Don’t blame him that your two floozies couldn’t stay put in one place.”
T’saya had not taken this well. “Expecting him to find one needle in a haystack instead of two? And what about us? Two High Zhaithans and an old African cook? Maybe moving through the streets we can get away with this implausible charade, but anywhere near the parade ground? I don’t think so. We look about as fucking believable as two wolves and a fat rabbit taking a stroll.”
“Then we’re going to have to do something to change your appearance somehow, aren’t we?”
Disguising T’saya had been less of a problem than Argo might have imagined, and Slide had demonstrated a clear-thinking skill for improvisation. He had obtained a long, hooded Mosul infantry rain slicker by the simple act demanding that a soldier who had one tied over his rucksack should give it up. He had obtained one of the round cooking-pot helmets by the same method. “You see? No matter how bizarre the order, no one questions a Zhaithan.”
Covered in the voluminous and shapeless slicker, hood up, helmet down over her eyes, and a carbine slung from her shoulder that had previously belonged to the Zhaithan whose horse Slide now rode, T’saya would pass all but the most close of scrutinies. She now looked like some tag-along servant of the equally disguised Slide and Argo rather than a prisoner, and although she had been less than pleased with the basic premise of the charade, she could offer no alternative solution, so that was how they made their way to the edge of the parade ground in time for the grand entry of Hassan IX.
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
At a slow and stately pace, Hassan and his Immortals proceeded across the parade ground to the podium upon which the emperor would exhibit himself. Even before they reached the raised structure, the Immortals were already dropping from their saddles, ready to ensure that their lord could mount the steps that led up to the platform in complete safety. The horses all moved to one side of the dais, and for a moment, Hassan remained the only mounted figure. He seemed to hesitate before finally swinging down from his charger with a lofty flourish of his dark cape. For some moments, he had sat, hands down, loosely holding the reins, and then slowly turned his head, taking in the men and the horses, the flames, the weapons and armor, both real and ceremonial. The movement was birdlike, albeit a powerful and confident bird of prey, and Argo tried to picture what such a man could be thinking, because somewhere, beyond all the power and ceremony, a man, if only to a minimal degree, had still to exist. Argo, however, was at a loss to imagine what could be possibly be going on in the mind of such a figure, be he emperor or arranged impostor. How did it feel to command such an array, to have men barking their fealty and willing to kill and die for you? Could any shred of common humanity be retained under such circumstances, or was the temptation to believe in one’s own divinity simply too seductive? Had Argo been older, wiser, or more well versed in the ways of his newfound perceptive crafts, he might have recognized the thought as the germ of dangerous temptation, the infiltration of a similar destructive seduction, but Argo Weaver was, at that point, none of those things, so he merely contemplated what it might be like to rule so absolutely.
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
“Urah!”
Still flamboyantly protected by the Immortals, Hassan IX mounted the reviewing stand, and, as he crossed to the central and focal position, batteries of electric arc lights came on, bathing the dais in dazzling, blue-white light. This was the first time that Argo could remember seeing electric light in such massed intensity, and he shared the common gasp of awe that it brought from the assembled troops. The light was reflected from the mirror-polished surface of the emperor’s armor to further enhance the illusion that he was near to a god incarnate, and Argo marveled that electricity, this most modern of inventions, should be used for a show that appealed to all that was base, barbaric, and superstitious among the watchers. As Hassan IX raised his arms in salute, a second drama commenced on the parade ground’s second platform, the stage of the death, the multiple gallows that would for so many that night be the stepping-off point from this world into the undecided possibility of the next. In the dimmer, more hellish light of high iron braziers and banks of burning torches, prisoners in the loose paper shifts of condemned heretics, with ropes already around their necks, were run onto the scaffold by impatient guards who acted as though they had a quota to meet, and indeed they might. Argo had no idea of the exact mechanics of a Mosul mass execution, but he could well appreciate that it was probably conducted according to some formula of frantic and grisly efficiency. The ropes around the victims’ necks were attached to iron hooks bolted to the underside of the gallows’ long, rectangular crosspiece. With blows and curses, they were forced into the approximation of a line, catches were sprung, traps opened, and bodies dropped into physical space and mortal infinity and were then cut down like so many sides of beef by crews in among the supports beneath the platform to make room for the next collective drop. As Hassan or his double posed and postured and men and women died twenty at a time, the roar of the troops picked up time to faster, double cadence.
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
Again Slide put a hand on
Argo’s shoulder. “Go past all this. This is just the facade of evil. Go past it and see if you can detect the other boy.”
A second line of bodies fell through the traps of the gallows, and the woodwork audibly groaned under the strain of so much deadweight. Argo shook his head. “I don’t think I can.”
“See through it, Argo Weaver. They have steamships and the telegraph, but what they are resorting to here is nothing short of human sacrifice. Most of the time, I bother very little with what human beings choose to do to each other, but this is a little too primitively bestial even for me.”
Argo stretched his concentration and new perception to what felt like its limits, but he could only look anguished and shake his head. “Nothing. I sense nothing. There’s nothing here but fire and electricity and death.”
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
RAPHAEL
The underofficer was yelling at the top of his lungs. “No need to push, there’s plenty for everyone!”
The crowd of men, however, paid him absolutely no heed. They pushed and shoved and even threw punches to gain a place closer to the carts from which the loaves of dark bread, the hard sausage, and the jugs of cheap wine and Teuton beer were being handed out on a first-come, first-served basis. Men who, in some cases, had hardly eaten for days, and other men who had been drunk equally as long, were suddenly facing a crude feast but discovering that they were going to have to fight for it. A mule that had hauled in one of the carts spooked at all the shouting, kicking, and gouging men and lashed out with its hind hooves. A cart had turned over in the violent ebb and flow of confusion, and now Mosul, Teuton, and Provincial Levies were rolling on the ground and slithering in the camp mud for tainted beer and a dirty loaf while all around a whole army howled in orchestrated dementia.
