by Andy Graham
Brennan should say something. Up until recently he would have. But now, why say anything? Brennan knew what he wanted to say: “In the 13th Legion, you do what you’re told, when you’re told, and nothing else.” He’d said this to Nascimento and Orr outside the Weeping Woods. They’d been hunting Franklin. Brennan pulled a hand out of his pocket. It was trembling.
“Do what you’re told,” he whispered. Who? Him or Malakan? “Do what you’re told.”
He was repeating himself. Lena had complained about that: Brennan’s constant warnings about men, about going out, about strangers. If he’d left her alone would she have not slept with Randall Soulier? Would she be alive? Had Randall picked Lena because she was Brennan’s sister? It was the kind of thing he’d do.
The thought twisted in his brain as Malakan, still grumbling, spat over the edge of the balcony. “Just because a hill in a wood on a mountain range is covered by one type of flower, it gets a special name and its own Devil. The Lion’s Crest?” He spat again. Farther this time. “Nonsense. Peasants.”
Brennan’s eyes flicked past Malakan, past the president’s corpse swinging from her Folly Tree, to the VP. He was on the phone. The president’s phone. Randall was laughing. Randall had slept with Lena, Brennan’s sister. Lena was dead. Hamilton was dead, the first man Brennan had killed. Brennan squeezed his eyes shut. Symmetry — it was important, but the balance that had stabilised Brennan’s life since Hamilton had got his probing hands on him had been rocked by Lena’s death. Symmetry, unfortunately, also wouldn’t shut Malakan up. The man was still blathering on about the superstitious peasants of Donia.
Malakan nudged Brennan with his elbow. “D’you believe that? I don’t believe that. Not me. I’m not gonna believe there’s monsters under a mountain or a hill or a bed or whatever.” Colours from the explosion washed across the beads of sweat on Malakan’s face. For one second he was tattooed with a kaleidoscope of reds, blues, greens and whites: the colours of the Ailan flag. Then they were gone. It left his face a portrait of bones and teeth. A portrait that was still talking.
“They got druids who can bring people back to life and identify people by the smell of their blood, too. You gonna tell me—”
Malakan’s words choked off as Brennan lunged for him. From one instant to the next, the Donian man was upended and hoisted over the parapet. His fingers scrabbled behind him, fingernails splitting on the stone edge as he tried to gain purchase.
Brennan didn’t know what the man was saying. Malakan could have been screaming. Could have been singing. Brennan neither knew nor cared. He held Malakan upside down and rattled him. Keys, tiny stones and lint fell out of his pockets as Brennan shook the screams out of him. The tiny lights of vehicles below were pinpricks of colour. Then with a grunt of air, Brennan dumped the private back on the balcony.
“What?” he stammered, scooting away from Brennan on his backside.
Brennan snapped his hands to his sides and hinged forwards from his hips until he could see the thread veins in the whites of Malakan’s eyes. “You’re not addressing a senior officer with the correct term. You’re not to speak unless you are spoken to. You’re not to look at anything else other than what I tell you to look at and right now,” — Brennan detached one of his hands from his side and clicked his fingers over Malakan’s head — “I’m telling you to watch the skies for any threat. Do you understand me?”
“Sir, yes, sir. But what if another one of those things falls from the sky?”
“Catch it.”
“Captain,” said the VP. “Just in time.” Brennan slammed the balcony door shut. Behind it, Malakan’s eyes were fixed firmly on the heavens. “Take a seat.”
Brennan sat. The corpses of the president’s dogs and the legionnaire they had killed were gone. The bitter smell of blood wasn’t.
“I think you might find this interesting.” As his screen powered up, his odd-coloured eyes gleamed. “Field-Marshal Chester,” Randall said in the sing-song voice of a primary school teacher. “So glad to see you out of hospital.”
“You killed Bethina.” Chester’s voice crackled. Brennan didn’t need to see her face to know she’d be scowling into the camera.
“The president is dead. A tragic turn of events. But we should not let that distract us from the real issue facing the country of Ailan today. Our enemy is not within, but without. The country of Mennai has threatened our borders. We need strong leadership. We need stability. I will provide that leadership. The nation can grieve for its fallen once the people are safe.”
“And when will that be? How many freedoms will it cost to ensure the people’s safety? How many laws will you change to ensure the rule of law? How many sons, daughters, brothers and sisters” — Brennan flinched — “will your peace cost us?”
“Really, Field-Marshal. I would have thought a military officer would have had more appetite for a good tear-up. We’ll have your legions running at capacity in no time.”
“And your approval rating.”
“My popularity ratings are secondary to the health of the nation, my dear.”
“My dear?”
Randall tilted the screen towards Brennan and winked at him. The light shining off it gave Chester an odd pallor. It turned her black skin a washed out grey, her eyes into coals. An edge was creeping into her voice, an edge the VP was ignorant of, or, more likely, ignoring.
“We’re going to war, Chester.”
“You cannot make that declaration without involving the government. That has been part of the constitution since Ailan was formed out of the embers of Brettia. Precisely to avoid that carnage.”
Randall waved a hand in the air. “You have to move with the times. That was then. The world has moved on. I intend to be a modern-day president who will have his fingers on the pulse of the people.”
“Or around their throats.”
As the president’s corpse twitched in the night breeze, there was an expression on the VP’s face that lasted no more than a second. It wasn’t regret or horror, not even resignation or gloating. It wasn’t any of the reactions Brennan would have expected. That troubled him. His job, questioning, had allowed him to see all manner of emotions from all kinds of people. He’d heard all types of claims, too, from lies to truths and all the various shades of fact that hid in between those two points. Brennan could read people, separate their words like he could separate their fingers. But the fleshy shudder that had racked the VP so briefly had represented more than just one emotion, was more complicated than the Seven Guilts for the Seven Sins. The closest Brennan could come to describing it was what he had once seen in the mirror just before President Hamilton had started touching him: a bruising innocence. But as soon as it had come, the VP’s expression had fled. And Bethina Laudanum’s corpse was once more hanging heavy and still.
“Chester, Chester, Chester,” Randall said, fingertips dancing on each other. “The threats we face now are greater and more indistinct. The bad old days of them and us on a battlefield are long gone. Life is more complicated now, hybrid-warfare, cyber-attacks and so on.”
“You are lecturing the field-marshal of Ailan on war?”
“Only an idiot thinks they know it all; only the insecure claim to be an expert. And you may be many things, but you are not an idiot. Question is, are you an expert? Because if you’re not, doesn’t that disqualify you from your post?” This time, the wink was aimed directly at his field-marshal.
“How dare you!” Chester’s fury was choked and tinny through the speakers.
“The people will understand that what I am doing is for their good.” Randall’s air of tolerant amusement was gone. The light flashed out of his eyes, one green, the other blue. “And if you know what is for your own good, Field-Marshal, you will not stand in my way. We wouldn’t want any more accidents, now would we?”
“You bastard.”
“I wish I were a bastard, Chester, I wish I were. I would rather be a bastard and damned for eternity as the pre-Flood text
s claimed would happen to those deplorable souls born out of wedlock. I would trade an infinity of purgatory for the parents I was cursed with. But that is not to be.” His finger hovered over the screen. “My team will be in touch. You are to do as they say. And next time you insult me, woman, it will be: you bastard, sir.”
With that, he hung up.
“Bitch,” he muttered, licking his lips. “Too risky to lose her, though. Too many accidents, and people will talk.” He spoke in a low voice, as if he had forgotten Brennan was there. His fingers were twitching, one nail bitten down to a red and bloody quick. “Would have been better if the gas explosion had killed her first time.” He slammed his hand down on the table, making the antique phone jingle. “Wouldn’t it, Captain?” the VP shouted. “It would have been better if that gas canister trick you suggested had killed your field-marshal, wouldn’t it?”
Brennan blinked, once. The rush of blood that had caused him to upend Private Malakan over the balcony was gone. He was back within himself, retreating, insides recoiling away from the undersurface of his own skin. It was an odd feeling, one he had tried to explain to his sister. Lena didn’t get it. The explanation didn’t make sense to anyone else. It made perfect sense to him. The world touched Brennan from the outside. This way, when he was hiding inside himself, he only needed to touch the world when he wanted to.
Another image, unbidden and unwanted, crawled into his mind: Randall touching Lena, slobbering over the smattering of pox scars she’d had over one eyebrow, pushing himself inside her. The images played through Brennan’s mind and twisted. Lena’s skin peeled back from her face in patches. The decay stripping her of her beauty. Worms and maggots crawled through her flesh. The smell of damp soil and rotting leaves tickled the back of Brennan’s nose. It was too real. It was—
“Brennan?” the VP shouted. A speck of spittle landed on Brennan’s cheek. “You going soft on me?”
“No, sir. Yes, sir.”
The VP’s eyes bulged. Had Lena thought them beautiful? Brennan’s head cocked to one side and met the VP’s gaze squarely. The image of Lena crumbled. Eyes were eyes. To be seen through, or, when Brennan was questioning — whispering! — to be prodded, poked, pierced or, occasionally, plucked out.
Randall yanked his tin of mints out of his pocket and popped a handful in his mouth, those soft, pluckable eyes of his looking anywhere but at Brennan’s dead gaze. “Yes. Well. Just checking you’re OK. And what in the seven levels of hell is that idiot doing?” Randall pointed to Malakan. The private was staring at the sky.
“No, sir. I am not going ‘soft in the head’. Yes, sir. It would have made your life easier if Field-Marshal Chester had died as planned. As for Private Malakan,” Brennan looked, and smiled. The private was using one hand to hold his head up. The discomfort of holding the position Brennan had ordered him into was written across his face in grimacing lines. “I believe he’s watching for rogue sun-fans.”
The VP clutched his head in his hands. The bitten red fingertip looked sore. Brennan the whisperer — Torturer, not whisperer, why won’t you admit to yourself that what you do is torture? — had already noticed the sore finger, the ragged nail, and had been considering the painful possibilities presented by the smallest of cuts and grazes: salt, for example. A simple thing, innocuous, yet full of potential.
Randall groaned. “I’m swimming in a sea of stupidity, surrounded by imbeciles clutching onto their own idiocy to stop themselves from drowning.”
“War, sir?” Brennan prompted. His eyes followed the VP’s finger. My sister, sir?
“Yes, Brennan, war. It’s about time.” He swiped his screen on. “We’ll have to increase the draft, impose emergency rules, increase tax, shut the internet down.”
“We control the internet already, sir.”
“Which is why we can shut it off, Brennan,” the VP said, separating each word into syllables, the way Brennan was mentally separating the man’s finger into bones. He’d start with the distal interphalangeal joint, like he had with the young legionnaire. And if there was a distal joint, there’d be a proximal interphalangeal joint, too. That would be next. Anatomy made sense to Brennan. It was symmetrical. Balanced. It wasn’t difficult. There was just a lot of it. Slightly less in the people he’d finished questioning, though.
“Besides, we don’t control the Light Net,” Randall said. “If we shut the whole internet down, we can kill that off once and for all. Something else Bethina should have done years ago.” He leapt to his feet. “Oldest trick in the book, Captain. Shut down the information flow, then feed the populace only what you want them to hear. Starve a vegetarian long enough and they’ll eat whatever animal is put in front of them, no matter how fluffy it once may have been. Principles be damned. Now get that idiot off the balcony. We’re leaving.”
“Sir? I thought you would be appropriating the president’s office.”
“Stinks, Brennan, stinks of Laudanum’s failures, of De Lette before her, and that paedophile Hamilton.”
Brennan’s insides shrank away from his skin just that little bit further. Count. From five down. Then four, three, two, one. Half. Breathe.
“I don’t like the previous occupants’ taste in decor, history nor facts.” He was standing by the window, staring at stained flagstones, at a memory Brennan suspected only the VP remembered now Laudanum was dead. “Once this building has been ruined in the upcoming war,” the VP said, his breath misting up the glass, “I am going to refashion the presidency in my own image, brick by brick, law by law, limb by limb.”
Randall stalked to the far end of the room. His finger hesitated over the lift call button. As Brennan watched, the man’s head pivoted towards the red binders on the bookshelves. The look on the VP’s face briefly distracted Brennan from the image of Lena cavorting in Randall’s bedsheets. “Sir?”
“Of course. Why didn’t I think of this before?” Randall grabbed an armful of binders and dumped them on a low table. He pulled one open. A page ripped. “Bethina’s diaries, Brennan. There may be something worth knowing in them. Read. And then we’ll go see the Famulus so you can get payback for your sister.”
10
White Coat. White Noise
The Kickshaw was a mess. Broken chairs lay on their backs amongst a sea of glass shards and alcoholic puddles. The secluded waxed table favoured by the bar’s monied guests was covered in scratches, its deep gouges cutting Ray Franklin’s reflection into pieces. It was a fair image of how he actually felt.
“What happened?” Stella hadn’t moved from the doorway to the alley. It was lit the colour of shark skin and contrasted starkly with the unforgiving light inside.
“A decent party?” Ray said. The joke didn’t bring any reaction. It wasn’t the best joke in the world. To be fair, it wasn’t the best joke in the room at the moment.
“Unsung.” Tino Martinez emerged from behind the bar. The scars across his face shone feverishly. One hand gripped his crutch, the other wrapped around a bat. Carved into the wood were the words ‘Ask me again about credit.’ His eyes scanned the group. “It’s true, then. Lynn’s dead.”
Ray and Stella spoke on top of each other.
“How did you know?”
“Where’s my daughter?”
To Ray, Martinez said, “Skovsky Senior radioed it in from the chopper. Stann Taille told him what happened.” To Stella, he said, “Where any young child should be in the middle of the night: asleep.” To Ray, he added, “I heard about Rose. I’m sorry.”
Ray held up his hands in a gesture that could have meant any number of things: I surrender, thank you or not now. Martinez didn’t press it, and for that, Ray was thankful. The men had served with each other. There was no need for anything else. There wouldn’t be unless Ray asked for help.
“What happened to him?” Martinez pointed to Dan.
“Not sure,” Ray said, his voice gruff. “The VP’s injected him with some stuff, this gwenium I think.”
“Gwenium?”
&nb
sp; “That element from under the mountains. Remember that?” Ray forced an unnaturally cheerful tone into his voice as he sat on the edge of the table. His back pain snickered at him, the recent bullet wound in his thigh throbbing as the pump of adrenaline eased off. “When my old 10th Legion team and I were sent into the mountains, got attacked by a mutant that used to be a top-level government scientist and almost killed? Games. That’s all it is to them, games. Our glorious leaders’ only goal is to consolidate their own power and their currency of choice is other people’s children.” He dusted the splinters off a chair and righted it, slamming it so hard into the ground a leg broke off. Damn it! Ray found another chair and managed to set it the right way up without breaking it. “But on a positive note, Stella’s going to fix her husband.”
Martinez’s face was impassive. “How, if she doesn’t know the problem?”
“By wearing a white coat and stethoscope and using big words.”
Stella was on one knee next to her husband, whispering to him, her hands comforting and assessing. The violence that had lashed through Dan’s frame earlier had subsided. He’d regained enough of who he was to stagger unaided from the site of the chopper crash to the Kickshaw but had now sunk back into a dreamlike state, twitching and moaning on the hard wood floor. “Where are your medical supplies?” she asked. “I want to see Emily.”
“She’s fine, Stella,” Martinez replied.
“My husband could be dying. My son has been kidnapped by the VP. I just watched a son kill his mother in cold blood and Lynn, your friend and the manager of this bar, sacrificed herself so we could escape our own government. I didn’t ask how my daughter is, I asked to see her. I also want to know what medical supplies you have. If they come with a white coat and stethoscope, I’ll wear them if it makes both you former-legionnaires feel better.” The words were clipped and lifeless.
