“I like it up here,” Marlyn replied, voice low, never taking his eyes from the screens before him. “It’s quiet, peaceful. Gives me time to think upon things.” He glanced briefly at the waiting shaman; the dark-haired youth looked drawn, agitated, glancing about with suspicious eyes. “You look impatient, Pol. Is there something on your mind?”
“What do you want? Stop playing games, I’ve got things to do.”
A flicker of a grin upon the Tulador’s face, but no humour there.
“These screens,” he said, gesturing with his cannon-arm at the console that wrapped about him. “They’re Draconis’ eyes within the ship. He sees much. Almost everything that happens within his body, in fact. I enjoy watching people, observing their goings on, the daily hustle and bustle of life aboard ship. His eyes aren’t everywhere, of course. He respects our privacy, which makes me laugh, for aren’t we nothing more than bugs to such a creature as he? Nevertheless, he doesn’t watch people as they go to the toilet. Doesn’t watch as they take their lovers to bed.” He sniffed. “No. His eyes are focused on areas of importance where people might meet. The Training Halls. The Armoury. The Common Room. The Refectory.” He fixed the shaman with inscrutable eyes as he voiced the next words. “The Brig.”
Was it just Draconis turning in its lazy arc across the sky, or did the shaman shudder at the words? Was it a trick of the silvery light from the screens, or did the pale youth grow whiter?
“Speak your piece, Guardsman.”
Marlyn turned his swivel chair to face the shaman before him.
“I was watching, Pol. The whole time. I know that we spoke of your impatience, but I didn’t think you’d risk everything by trying something so… reckless.”
“What would you have me do?” the indignant youth spat in reply. “Gwenna is too soft. These times in which we live demand action.”
“I understand that,” nodded the Tulador to Pol’s surprise. “I don’t agree with your actions, but I understand them. And for that, I’ve not told anyone what I saw. Not yet.” The shaman let out a sigh of pent breath, but Marlyn wasn’t done. “But something intrigues me. After your… altercation, the prisoner laughed. And you? You looked terrified. Before the Woodsman and his men arrived, you looked ready to kill that man.” He leaned forwards. “Why? What did he learn that scared you so much, Pol? What secret do you have that you would kill to protect?”
The shaman was frozen, his hands now white-knuckled fists by his sides, eyes staring but mouth unable to frame a reply. Long moments passed like this. Then finally, with a sigh that spoke of bitter disappointment, Marlyn continued.
“We have a saying in Tulador,” Marlyn began, before correcting himself. “Had a saying in Tulador. ‘Kill a cow, save a herd.’ When a cow got the hacking cough, we had to remove it from the herd quickly, lest it spread the illness to the rest and we lose an entire year’s worth of cattle.”
“And where are you going with this?” Pol asked him, eyes dark.
“You’ve got the hacking cough, Pol. And you need to go, lest you infect us all.” Marlyn’s eyes were sad, but resolute. “First chance you get, distance yourself from us, find an excuse to go on a lengthy mission, a quest. Anything. Because if you don’t, then I will have no choice but to tell Lord Stone everything I saw…”
Chapter Eleven:
Twenty channels. Nothing on. Wasn’t it always the case? With a snort, Michael pressed the button on the seat-back screen, the children’s movie disappearing to be replaced by a real-time map that showed the plane and its voyage across the world. Right now it showed the Airbus to be passing over the Mediterranean.
A voice rang out over the first-class cabin’s speakers.
“Ladies and gentleman, this is your Captain speaking.” The voice was middle-eastern, yet spoke English with a cultured RP accent, as all pilots were wont to do. “We are just coming up to Crete. We have a nice tailwind and should be coming into London slightly ahead of schedule. I will update you further in another hour’s time. In the meantime, please sit back and enjoy the flight.”
Michael smiled. Oh, he thought, I will. This is probably going to be the last flight I make for some time. A stewardess floated down the spacious aisle between the first-class seats, leggy and beautiful in her red Emirates uniform.
“Miss? Any chance of a glass of champagne?”
“Of course, sir.”
Was it that he felt like celebrating? Or was it to steady his nerves? This was to be his time of triumph; he was to leave a mark upon the world. The Brotherhood were about to get themselves taken seriously upon the world stage, making the bomb of but weeks ago seem like nothing more than a child’s prank.
But he had to have trust. He wasn’t scared of death, no, he had long been inured to the threat of oblivion in service to his cause. But he’d been promised revenge. And to die too soon would mean that he would never be able to see it come to fruition.
The stewardess handed him the glass of wine and he took a sip. It was good stuff, not the cheap swill they would serve on some other airlines. Just trust in the Masters, he told himself. Trust in that mysterious man, Memphias, and his promises.
You will come to no harm. You will have your revenge.
In the meantime, he heard the pilot’s voice again in his head; just sit back and enjoy the flight.
***
He hadn’t changed. Those eyes, so stern, yet with a hint of amusement forever twinkling therein. That long hair, black and grey, tied into long braids. That tanned and weather-beaten skin. Master Wrynn, greatest of all shamans, teacher of Gwenna and, centuries earlier, even Stone himself, hadn’t changed at all since Stone had last seen him. But then, how could he?
He was dead. And the dead didn’t age a day.
They walked through the Pagoda, speaking of old times and the developments since. Long, crystal bridges stretched out into the forests, allowing them to observe the goings on of the life beneath as they walked and talked. Far overhead, the sun beat down upon them with warm and soothing rays. Or a sun, at least. To the Avatar of Fire, the shaping and moulding of a fresh star to bring light and warmth to this garden was no hardship.
“How are you enjoying being dead?”
The bluntness of Stone’s question brought forth a laugh from the old shaman.
“It’s peaceful,” Wrynn replied. “I spend my time cultivating this garden, communing with the spirits, learning more of their ways. Or else, sleeping. It’s nice to rest. It’s nice to have the burden of responsibility off my shoulders.” He glanced over at the titan that strode beside him. “How about you, Stone? How are you enjoying life?”
“I’m finding it… a struggle.”
“So I heard,” the old man replied with a nod as they continued walking down the clear bridge, the roars of jungle cats and the caws of multi-winged parrots calling from below. “What exactly is it that you’re finding a struggle, my young apprentice?”
Stone stopped and looked at his mentor.
“The power. It’s overwhelming. I feel saturated by it, and that’s without even holding my Glaives and really opening myself up to it. When I agreed to this deal with the Avatars, I don’t think I really had a true idea of their scope, the vastness of their power. I don’t think I knew what I was letting myself in for.”
“You’re worried.”
“I am. I’m worried that I might accidentally do something that I’ll regret. I struggle to explain what it’s like, having such infinite power at your command. I’m afraid to hold someone, for fear that I might break them. Afraid to scrutinize someone too closely, in case I flay the flesh from their bones through simply staring too hard.” He gazed off into the forest. “Reality wasn’t meant to handle a being like me. I feel like the world is made of wax. And I have hands of fire.”
Silence for a few moments, bar the occasional animal screech and call. Then Wrynn’s voice.
“You’re lying, Nagah-Slayer. Lying to me and to yourself.”
The titan turned, looking down
at his master.
“How do you mean?”
The shaman gave a sad smile and looked his pupil in the eye. Wrynn was no small man; tall and broad, a true example of the Plains People, but still he had to crane his neck.
“You’re afraid that some trace of the evil that was once inside you still remains. You’re afraid that to lose yourself in this power, to use it to its fullest, might mean that Invictus would rise again.”
“Is it so foolish to fear that?”
“Invictus wasn’t you, Stone. It was merely the evil influence of Those Beyond the Veil, corrupting you.”
Stone shook his head.
“No. It was me. Yes, the whispers in the night changed me, twisted me. But it was still me. Every act of evil, every life I ordered ended for my own amusement; I remember them all. I took those decisions, no-one did it for me.” He closed his eyes. Rarely did he relive those days, those dark and blood-soaked days when he ruled as Invictus the Barbarian King. “I’d thought Lanah lost. The Plains People of our village scattered, destroyed. Just as I’d built a life for myself, it had been taken away again. My anger, my hatred, they became my justification. I told myself that I was entitled to do what I pleased, to take whatever I wished, because of what had happened to me in the past. Those thoughts were my own; the whispers of Those Beyond the Veil merely reinforced them.” He turned, showing his master his huge hands. “The blood of countless innocents stains these hands. And if there’s even a chance that such evil could awaken once more, then should I not do everything I can to minimize that risk?”
Wrynn stared him in the eye for a moment, witnessing the turmoil and anguish that went on in there. Then grunted.
“Come with me.”
The shaman vanished in a cloud of grey smoke, to be replaced by a raven with streaks of white and grey in its black feathers. With a caw, the raven flew, soaring upon the breeze and across, over the forest. Stone leapt from the crystal bridge, following the bird into the sky.
Over the canopy they went, till at last the forest came to an end, revealing great grasslands that stretched off in every direction. The raven landed upon a rocky outcrop and crowed for Stone to follow. He did so, landing at the bird’s side, even as it vanished in a cloud of woody smoke, the shaman taking its place once more.
“You see this grassland, Nagah-Slayer?” The titan did; the savannah stretched off far in every direction; the grass was dry, sun-baked, lifeless. No sustenance here for the beasts. “Watch this,” the shaman commanded him.
Stone did as he was told, watching, waiting, wondering why the man had brought him here. As he observed with patient green eyes, a rushing of wind, a roaring in the distance. A spirit of Fire, a great, whirling vortex of living flame, came sweeping across the plains. Where it strode, the withered and parched grass caught light in great swathes, burning down to black ash. With a shriek and a roar, the spirit passed by the watching pair, swirling past them in a flurry of flame and fury, leaving them both untouched, for both were beyond harming in their own ways.
Finally, after long minutes, the creature was gone, leaving the grassland about the pair now nothing more than a charred and smoking ruin with patches of flame. Where once there was dead grass, fit for nothing, now there was wasteland, fit for nothing still. What was the lesson here?
“Follow me, apprentice,” urged the shaman, as he climbed down from the rocky outcrop and into the ashen soil. Stone did so, watching with a puzzled frown as the old man knelt down to the ground. With great care, he swept aside some of the still warm ash, revealing what lay beneath. It was a green shoot, tiny, fresh, fragile. But growing, striving upwards for the light. “You see this, Stone?” The shaman beamed as he cupped the shoot, as though twere the most prized thing in all of creation. “You see this new life? Where before there was but death, the cleansing fires came. And from the ashes, new life sprouts up, vigorous and ready for the challenges that lay ahead.”
Stone nodded, thinking that he understood now, his teacher’s lesson.
“You’re saying that I am that shoot. That fresh life…”
Wrynn rose, laughing and shaking his head as he gestured to the plains about them and shouted. His booming words echoed out across the burning, smoking grasslands.
“No, Nagah-Slayer!” he roared, words filled with elation. “You are the FIRE! You come to raze the old and make way for the new!”
Stone staggered backwards at the import of his master’s words, but then fresh heat, magnitudes beyond that spirit of before, blasted him from the side and he turned. The Avatar of Fire hovered there, regarding him with eyes of incandescent intensity.
You carry my flame within your veins, child. That you might cleanse the world of all impurity.
A tsunami crash of endless waves and Stone was battered from the other side now. Water stood there, smiling, her words rushing forth in a spray of icy-cold brine.
You take with you my life-giving waters, that new life might grow in its place.
Glittery light swirled about him in dizzying spirals as laughter filled the sky.
“You feel our haste, our speed, our urgency filling your veins, Stone,” the Avatar of Air told him in a dozen overlaid voices as they zipped on past. “That you might not tarry, but hurry towards this new age.”
A sense of gravity, of infinite size and strength from behind, so Stone turned. There, looming, larger than any mortal mind could comprehend, the Avatar of Earth stood, his frame casting them all into shadow.
And within your body, it growled, in a voice like the grinding of continents, you carry my strength, that you may endure, come what may.
Stone turned, whirled, battered from every quarter by the boundless and remorseless power of the elements, before falling to his knees with a crash.
“But you said that I would still be me?” he shouted into the din. “You said that I would remain Graeme Stone?”
Wrynn stepped forwards, drawing near, a smile of sympathy on his face.
“You are and always will remain Graeme Stone, Nagah-Slayer,” he told the fallen titan. “But what defines that man has changed.” He looked about at the Avatars that surrounded them. “Earth, Fire, Water and Air; the Avatars can never escape what they are. The fury of the flame, the remorseless crashing of the waves, the unending strength of the earth, the speed of the air; these are part of you now. You must learn to live with them. And more than that, to embrace them.”
Stone looked up at his teacher’s words. The shaman’s eyes were full of empathy, yet tempered with determination.
“I’m not sure I can.”
“You can. Did you hear them? They have given you everything you need.”
“I’m… afraid.”
That so mighty a being might utter so pathetic a sentence must have seemed paradoxical, but Master Wrynn merely smiled.
“I know. As would I be. As would anyone. But I cannot take that burden. No-one can. It is yours and yours alone. For you, out of all creatures in the universe, are the only one who can shoulder this burden.”
***
An emergency meeting of Parliament. The security of the country at stake. A simple phone call to the Prime Minister had been all it had taken; for even the head of state had to heed the word of the Secretary of State for Defence.
Andrews strode down the corridors of Westminster, with purpose, yet also with nervous butterflies in his stomach. Was he really going to do this? To his sides, Evans, Gwenna, the Woodsman and Arbistrath. Of their leader, Stone, no sign. Though the red-haired shaman had assured him that their Lord would be making an appearance. She had a ‘feeling.’
A feeling.
That about summed this up, this whole lunatic operation, didn’t it? What was he going to say to the gathered ministers, to the Prime Minister himself? How ludicrous would these words that were about to come out of his mouth sound to the rational, to those that hadn’t yet experienced what he had? They would seem like the ravings of a madman. Fairy tales. They would ship him to the loony bin.
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His career would be over.
Christ, he could scarce believe any of it himself, even with the coppery taste of translocation still in his mouth. Armed police stood guard at the sides of the corridor near the entrance to the House of Commons. He nodded at them and they returned the favour, opening the wide and heavy double doors. That familiar waft of age, of tradition, of oak and leather and politics wafted out from that hallowed chamber and he closed his eyes briefly and stopped.
Was he really going ahead with this? If things didn’t go well, he would be a laughing stock. Who would believe them? He had told that girl, Gwenna, and the man, Alann, all along that it was folly. But too late; Parliament had been convened, all MPs within striking distance of London here to listen to his words, each told that it was a matter of vital interest to the security of Britain.
He opened his eyes, nodded to his companions, and strode in. Politicians, dozens of them, filling the benches on either side of the hall. There was the Prime Minister, his friend and fellow politician, in discussion with his deputies. At noticing Andrews’ appearance, he rose, questioning eyes darting his way.
Hands shaking, yet resolute, the Defence Secretary raised his head and walked forwards, not waiting for protocol, instead speaking directly and loudly.
“Mr Prime Minister. Gathered and esteemed members of Parliament. I come bearing news. And I think you might need to sit down…”
***
“Sorry, excuse me.”
A man brushed past him going the other way as Michael made his way down the aisle, back from the toilets. Just as he did, a whispering rose up, sinister, quiet, insistent and causing a shiver to work its way up the length of his spine.
That is he, our most loyal servant. That man is the one. Do what you must before he comes back.
Michael turned, glancing back the way he had come. The man, nondescript, casually dressed, opened a toilet and vanished into it. He must be an air-marshal, armed with a Taser, tasked with stopping any ‘shenanigans’ that might occur aboard a long-haul flight such as this. There would be no other reason for those urgent whispers to warn him.
Bloodless Revolution Page 14
