by Mick Farren
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
Raphael was hungry, but he stood back from the bloody and rapidly regressing scrimmage as though a part of him would go no further. Some final portion of his humanity was in revolt. Oh, yes, he had been through their basic training. He had been beaten, brutalized, humiliated, and taught to respond like a machine. He had ridden on their troopships and their trucks, and he had seen their Dark Things from Other Places move past in horrific formation while the Mothmen fluttered above. He was even willing to go to his death in one of their human waves, but he was not going to be turned into an animal by Hassan IX and his braying legions. A short Mosul, built like a brick, shouldered past Raphael with a loaf of bread clutched to his chest like a Frankish football. The man’s eyes were glazed, revealing a mind that had vacated all else in favor of feral rage. In that instant, Raphael realized that the final sacrifice required by Hassan’s empire and its flame banners was the surrender to a blind combat madness. They could break his bloody body, but Raphael Vega was not going to give up his mind. Enough was enough, and he had reached the point of enough.
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
Pascal was long gone, stumbling and struggling somewhere in the mud, as mad as any Mosul, and had Raphael not been standing alone, apparently the only man who remained in the camp who was prepared to wrestle back his sanity, he would not have seen the two girls. The previous night, they had been free and seductive; now they were captives and nothing short of wretched and terrified. They rode in a motorized tumbrel of the Zhaithan with a dozen other prisoners and four guards armed with fixed bayonets. Their hands were locked into steel cuffs, and their veils torn away to reveal their faces. No mistake was possible, and, for an instant, he believed that he locked eyes with the red-headed girl, causing a frown of puzzled and unreal recognition to cross her unhappy and frightened face. Raphael’s first thought was that the two were being taken to the gallows on the parade ground, but they had no ropes around their necks, and the tumbrel was headed in entirely the wrong direction. In a flash he realized that the tumbrel’s destination was the Bunker. Raphael might have been new to the camp, but he had already heard about the Bunker. The Bunker was the name given by the rank and file to the Ministry of Virtue headquarters by the Potomac. It had earned the title partly by the fact that it was one of the few permanent brick and cement structures in the camp and also because its grim vaults and corridors were reputed to extend far under the ground. The Bunker was a place of fear, with tales of torture and human experimentation that had even seasoned veterans swivelling their eyes to find another place to look as they passed by the squat, square edifice, but Raphael knew he had no option but to follow. Somehow he had to achieve the impossible and free the women of his dreams from the clutches of the Zhaithan, and, with no clear idea of exactly how he was going to accomplish such an impossibility, he settled his breechloader more comfortably on his shoulder and quickly followed as the camp roared on.
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
“Urah-urah!”
CORDELIA
If any consolation at all could be gleaned from entering the headquarters of the Ministry of Virtue, it was that they were way from the howling soldiers and the madness in the camp outside. Not that the Bunker was not consumed by its own insanity. The upper levels came with the complete stamping, shouting chaos of institutional panic. What could only be described as the stage manager of the mass executions taking place on the parade ground, a slight and very verbal Zhaithan superintendent in a scarlet cape, and with a leaning to hysteria, was short of victims and screaming like an impresario under stress. Outside was a traffic of motorized tumbrels and carts pulled by mules filled with the recently arrested coming in and the condemned going out, and the lethal stage manager was hysterically attempting to cut the turnaround time in half. No sooner were Cordelia and Jesamine pushed into the echoing expanse of the very first, ground-level, raw-concrete booking area than he pointed at the entire group of which they were two parts and screamed at the regular army Mosul guards, who, with their muskets and fixed bayonets, were providing most of the threat and muscle for the increasingly chaotic process.
“Three minutes to get that new bunch stripped down, roped up, dressed up, and out to the parade ground. Three minutes and no longer, you hear me?”
A Zhaithan records officer in black trimmed with blue looked up. “You can’t send them straight out with no paperwork. How the hell do you think we’re going to turn in an accurate death roll?”
This only forced the scarlet superintendent’s blood pressure higher. “Sodomize the paperwork, you retard. Just get them out of here. Hang and burn the quota, fake the paperwork, and let the Twins sort out the sinners.”
Even in Albany they knew about the Bunker. The Bunker was where spies from Royal Military Intelligence ended their days, a pistol shot in the back of the head if they were lucky. It was where the resistance fighters from the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian partisans were brought and interrogated until they gave up the location of their camps, or they gave up their lives. Cordelia moved in a daze and the unsupported belief that this simply could not be happening to her. The combination of the two kept her just a fraction away from the brink of wordless, screaming terror. She was a lady of Albany, and they would not see her crack, even at the end. She kept telling herself that Lady Cordelia Blakeney surely had a more elevated destiny than ending her days as part of a heathen death spectacle. That kind of horror happened to other people. As she had been coming in, she had caught a fleeting glimpse of a prisoner who looked like a battered and bloody Phelan Mallory on his way out with a rope around his neck. She could not be fully sure it was him and far preferred to imagine that she had been mistaken. That kind of horror might happen to other people, but when one of the other people in question was revealed as a recent lover, it made the idea much harder to believe.
At the same time as the superintendent and the records officer were arguing the fate, or at least the imminence of the fate, of the new intake of prisoners, two Zhaithan in plain black, but with an air of command that could counter anything in the place, even the scarlet superintendent, were carefully and methodically inspecting all the female prisoners who were being brought in. All were swiftly dismissed and consigned to their fate until the two halted in front of Cordelia and Jesamine.
“Names?”
“Jesamine.”
“Cordelia.”
“Status?”
“Concubine.”
“Concubine.”
“Owner?”
“Colonel Phaall, 4th Teuton Engineers.”
“Colonel Phaall, 4th Teuton Engineers.”
The recitation would soon become a mantra. The black Zhaithan nodded and turned to their armed escort of six regulars. “Pull these two out of line and take them to Basement One.”
The Mosul moved to haul the two women out of the line, but the scarlet superintendent immediately protested. “What the hell are you doing with those two? I need every flammable body I can get.”
One of the black Zhaithan directed a chill gaze in the man’s direction, as though he was noticing him for the first time. “These two are Category A detainees.”
The scarlet superintendent’s eyes widened, and he deflated considerably. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, you do now.”
The Zhaithan motioned impatiently to the regulars, who had paused to see the outcome of the priestly dispute. “Basement One, and the Twins help you if they don’t remain anything but perfectly intact.”
Apparently the Lady Cordelia was neither for hanging nor burning just yet, and what might be in store instead was excluded from her thoughts as far as that was possible, as was the speculation on how exactly one qualified as a Category A detainee. She
shunned speculation, knowing it was not the coward who died a thousand times but the poor bastard with an overactive imagination. They pushed her and Jesamine across the booking area and down a flight of concrete steps with muskets pressed against their backs. Cordelia’s kaftan was torn and dragging. It kept threatening to trip her, and she had trouble keeping her feet. In her dogged concentration on the small, moment-by-moment challenges, she began to believe that she might be okay if she could remain standing, and, indeed, maybe more by luck than agility, she made it to the bottom of the steps without falling and found herself in a long, grey, electrically lit corridor with blank cement walls the color of chronic depression. A dozen or more women, all give-or-take young, and equally give-or-take pretty, in various states of torn and abused disarray, stood along the walls, strictly positioned some eight or nine feet apart to make conversation difficult. Seemingly, no chances were being taken with Category A detainees. Each one was assigned a Mosul guard of her own who stood facing her, standing straight against the opposite wall of the corridor, weapon at the ready. For a long time, their only function seemed to be to wait and be afraid. The black Zhaithan had positioned themselves at the end of the corridor, and they, too, waited. Waiting looked to be a major occupation in the religion of Ignir and Aksura.
“Cordelia?”
The word came out of nowhere, simultaneously as a whisper in her ear and a shimmer of soft light in her inner vision.
“Cordelia, can you hear me?”
Cordelia concentrated hard. Could the linkage that had been achieved during the act of passion be duplicated in the this long and narrow, tomb-grey anteroom to the Lady-only-knew-what, under the eyes of armed and hostile men? “Jesamine, I can hear you.”
“Can you respond without speaking?”
Cordelia cursed inwardly. Jesamine’s question revealed that she was not hearing her. How could they hope to mesh in this Goddessforsaken underground vault? “I’m trying as hard as I can. Why can I hear you, and you can’t hear me?”
“Cordelia?”
Was this their first voluntarily induced contact? Cordelia was never to know. At that moment, the black Zhaithan stiffened and formally turned, facing inwards to the stairs. At the same time, one of them barked an order to the occupants of the corridor. “Guards to attention! Prisoners stand straight. Prepare to look upon Her Grand Eminence Jeakqual-Ahrach.”
ARGO
Torches were being set to the Ziggurat. The chant of the crowd once again doubled its tempo.
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
The complex structure of the wooden pyramid that was going to be incinerated to laud, honor, and glorify the Twin Deities Ignir and Aksura was honeycombed with cramped cages, openwork wooden cells the largest of which contained five unfortunate victims and the smallest just a single crouched and lonely sacrifice. All would shortly be burned alive, just as Gaila Ford had been burned alive in Thakenham, an event that, to Argo, now seemed like a thousand years ago. Prior to the formal ignition of the fire, the electric lights that illuminated the reviewing platform had been dimmed. Argo had expected Hassan or his double to make some kind of stirring speech that would inspire his troops to do and die, but that was not the way of the Mosul. It was enough that Hassan should appear before them. He uttered no more than a few dozen words, in a firm but somewhat singsong baritone, but they seemed to be enough.
“Warriors of the Mosul, my brothers, behold us and let all men tremble because we are once more gathered for the Invocation for Victory. We stand on the edge of this wide river, in the shadow of those victories that belonged to our fathers when they marched from the Indus to Hispania with the Holy Twins going on before them, when they marched over the dead of their enemies and the fallen unbelievers to build an empire like the world had never before seen and that would make all who beheld shiver at its terrible majesty. We have now brought that same majesty and the same will to conquest to a new world, and, like the old world, it will fall to the might of our arms. Warriors of the Mosul, my brothers, we have gathered for the Invocation for Victory. In the sure and certain knowledge of the greatness of the victory soon to be ours, let the hallowed flames of the all-powerful Ignir and Aksura at this time be kindled, and let all our enemies fall back in fear from its dread illumination. Warriors of the Mosul, my brothers, behold us and let all men tremble.”
An honor guard of Zhaithan elite bearing flaming torches marched to the Ziggurat, and as the lights dimmed on the reviewing platform, a halt and hunchbacked figure in a plain hooded cape, aided in his walking by two Zhaithan attendants, had moved to stand beside the emperor. When Hassan had taken the stage, Slide and Argo had dismounted from their horses and stood with T’saya way back on the edge of the crowd, the two phoney priests holding the reins of their mounts. At the appearance of the hunchback, T’saya and Slide had exchanged ominous glances, and Argo had to ask. “Is that…?”
Slide quickly cut him off. “Don’t say his name. Now that you can actually see the monster, and he can see you, don’t, for any reason, say his name.”
The quietly ominous arrival of Quadaron-Ahrach from out of the darkness had caused a hush to fall over the crowd that was little short of uncanny. The figure of the man might be close to invisible in the gloom, but the awe and fear that greeted his coming said a million times more than any physical impression. Then the honor guard applied the first torches to the wood at the base of the Ziggurat, and a new and even more hideous roar broke out. What had once been mere baying became a violent shrieking and stamping.
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
The first flames were insignificant, almost harmless, but with the wood of the structure soaked in tar and kerosene, it spread like an angry, all-living, all-consuming totality, horizontally around the base but with tongues of exploratory fire leaping vertically to the higher levels, first following the geometry of the supports and the cross beams but then blossoming into the free-form patterns of rapidly soaring conflagration. Black smoke rose and swooped in the night wind off the river, causing the human sacrifices in their cages to start coughing before they began to scream. A burning figure in a cage close to the ground managed to kick his way free, breaking through the glowing, flaring, half-charred wood and running from the blazing Ziggurat only to be bayoneted by one of a circle of soldiers who formed a perimeter, at a tolerable distance from the heat, for the purpose of containing such possible escapees. Given the same grim choice, Argo supposed the swift stab of the bayonet was preferable to the slower roasting and choking. When the first fire reached the apex of the Ziggurat, it set off a preset pyrotechnic device that blasted the sky with multicolored flares of red and purple radiance. The crowd, which had been watching the burning and death up to that point with a certain awed reticence, erupted once again.
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
“Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
Argo, to his own total horror, caught himself mouthing the cheer along with the Mosul pack. “Urah-urah! Urah-urahha!”
Argo glanced quickly around to see if either Slide or T’saya had noticed. Apparently not, but both their faces were hidden, T’saya’s by her borrowed helmet and the hood of her slicker, and Slide’s by the chain mail veil of the Zhaithan helmet, so Argo was unable to gauge their reaction to the Invocation for Victory or the way in which he had momentarily succumbed to it. To find himself going along with the barbarian horde was a considerable shock. Slide had already warned him that his newfound perceptions could make him vulnerable, but vulnerable to what? He had assumed that the ghastly circus was nothing more than deliberately barbaric spectacle and induced mass hysteria, but was a more real and multidimen
sional power at work in this macabre and brutal ceremony than just illusion and madness? Slide was present, and so was Quadaron-Ahrach. The two opposing forces were perhaps more than enough reality for the circumstances. He turned away from the Ziggurat that, with all of its incarcerated humans mercifully dead, was starting to resemble a man-made volcano, and looked towards the review dais. Hassan had left the stage, protected by his Immortals, but Quadaron-Ahrach still remained, attended by only a small squad of Zhaithan elite. Argo found himself staring at the mysterious draped figure as though drawn to the High Zhaithan, and, as he stared, he thought he saw the gleam of red luminous eyes in the darkness under the cowl of the high priest’s robe. Such a vision could surely only be an illusion. The distance was too far to see such a detail even if it existed. But even as illusion, it chilled Argo to the core of his bones.
JESAMINE
The order had been curt. “Strip them, and bring the black ropes.”
The ropes had turned out to be lengths of the finest braided silk. Even in her cruelty, and in the bleak surroundings of the Bunker, Her Grand Eminence Jeakqual-Ahrach liked to handle beautiful and voluptuous things. The room to which Jesamine and Cordelia had been taken was down a further flight of steep steps and along another cement corridor. The subbasement cell was large, severely rectangular, and plainly designed for a variety of intense restraint. Pulleys and chains depended from the ceiling, and steel rings were anchored in the wall. A thick stainless steel pole ran from one side of the room to the other at a height of about to six and a half feet from the flagstone floor, and it was to this that Jesamine and Cordelia were directed. A young Provincial Levy with a rifle stood guard in the outer corridor as Jeakqual-Ahrach’s two black Zhaithan assistants looped the lengths of silk over the pole, knotted the ends around Jesamine and Cordelia’s wrists, and then pulled them taut so the two women were hauled up to half-hang and half-strain on tiptoe with their arms stretched above their heads. Jesamine found that the most comfortable position, in a circumstance in which comfortable was a highly relative term, was to drop her head forward, except that, when she did that, she could see the floor had a drain set in its center, presumably so blood and any other bespattering fluids could be easily sluiced away.
