by Andy Graham
“Well, just use the sister anyway. It can’t hurt.”
And in the background, the Famulus’s screams dropped to a horrified whimpering as Wu-Brocker took a break from her version of ‘just-use-her-anyway-it-can’t-hurt’.
“And do what, sir?”
“What do you mean ‘do what’? I’ve already given you your orders.”
Wu-Brocker’s dead gaze was heavy on Randall, judging. Brennan is a liability, it said. Henndrik thinks so. You know so. Brennan doesn’t think, he does; you’ve sent a butcher to do a surgeon’s job. She clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth and to Randall it sounded like a bone gavel on a dead man’s skull.
“Get the Elders,” he repeated, feigning a patience that was rapidly wearing thin. “They know everything. They know how the gwenium—”
“The element?”
“Yes, Brennan, the bloody element. Use the Elders to find the element. The monster that was Professor Shaw is still down there. The Elders must know a way around him and I think we need to go in subtle rather than hard.”
The Famulus’s whimpers were now underpinned by Benn-John’s frantic whispering and Jake’s sobs.
“Yes, sir.”
Randall was used to Brennan’s voice being lifeless but this was corpse-like. “Brennan?” Captain Brennan’s answer was drowned out by a gurgling scream from the Famulus. “Forget it, Brennan. Find the Elders. Keep them alive. Alive, OK? They must know things we can use. Get the gwenium.”
He slammed the receiver back in the pronged hooks that stuck out of the wall. The black plastic clipped the twin bells that sat above the phone. They chimed, clear and true, and utterly unsuited for the horror unfolding behind him. “The carnage,” he thought in a voice that reminded him of Ray Franklin.
The Famulus’s arms were red raw where she had tried to escape the thick, double-holed leather restraints. Her hair, thin and lank at the best of times, seemed to be falling out as he watched. But her face was gone on one side. A perfect square of skin was just missing. It was dangling over Wu-Brocker’s forefinger like a pink handkerchief.
“What are you doing?” he asked, the niggling doubts about Brennan temporarily buried.
“Research,” the ageing surgeon, the scourge of the secret medical camps, hospitals, special schools and correctional facilities the government had established over the years, replied.
“Research? Into what?”
“Pain.”
“I thought you were a dermatologist?”
“The skin is the largest sensory organ in the body. It is secondary only to the brain and the viscera in being able to generate pain. Cutting out tongues and poking out eyes only create a temporary nociceptive stimulus—”
“A temporary what stimulus?”
“Nociceptive. Think of it as potentially pain provoking.”
Randall had killed his parents. He’d watched videos of rebels, or to be precise, political opponents, being killed in the Silk Revolution. He’d tortured a young legionnaire to death. But each of those things had been accompanied by an emotional reaction that, in a perverted way, made it better. This, what he was witnessing from Wu-Brocker, was as lifeless and chilling as her face. He stared at the weeping red flesh that had been the Famulus’s cheek. The skin that should have covered it hung across Wu-Brocker’s fingers. “‘Potentially pain provoking’?”
“Removing skin creates a strong stimulus. If we understand this, we will understand more. The skin is not a glamorous thing to study. I am making a sacrifice. I am studying pain. I am helping science.”
Randall’s horror was subsumed by two things. The first was a grudging acknowledgement that she had a point. “Skin is the second most important part of your personality,” a celebrity dentist called Neumann had once said, before making sure everyone had known what she thought the first was. But skin was not really a popular career destination. Kids and sports and cancer were where the glamour and the money were. Skin? Not so much. The second thought that hit him was that any sense of moral responsibility or even humanity that Wu-Brocker may have once had in her heyday, any sense that she was helping humanity, was as pickled as she was.
“You’re mad,” he whispered.
“Benn. John. Benn. John. Benn. John. Benn. John.” The orange-smocked orderly was both trying to shelter Jake Swann and hide behind him at the same time.
“I am a scientist. A doctor. We are the salvation of society.”
A series of cobwebs that hung over the salvation of society were pulled from the ceiling by a breeze that nosed its way into the room. They floated down to lie like a shroud over the Famulus’s eyes, a trailing edge stuck to the bloody mess of her cheek.
I wanted to gloat, Randall thought, to lord it over you. In your role as the Famulus you spent years lording it over the soft-in-the-head, the gullible and the fools, those that wanted to believe the unbelievable. I wanted to tease you with the secret knowledge of my plan to assassinate Field-Marshal Chester, so you would know. Isn’t that what you like? The power that secrets hold? Bethina pretended to be your acolyte. Did she let you into any secrets? I wanted to spend hours toying with you, tempting you with freedom like I did before, only to slam that door shut on your inquisitive fingers like a mousetrap on a rodent’s neck. I wanted to tell you that I killed my father and my mother, David Prothero and Rose Franklin. I wanted to tell you I seem to have a taste for it. But seeing as most people only have two parents, I’ve run out. Morally, there’s nowhere left to go once you’ve killed your parents other than the genocide of your own race.
And at this point he took a mental breath in.
But for the pure fact that you irritated me, and killed the women I had been sleeping with, I wanted Wu-Brocker to do whatever she wanted with you. I wanted you to suffer like no one ever has.
In the face of what Wu-Brocker took as justifiable behaviour, his thoughts came out as a strangled squeak. A squeak echoed by Jake Swann. A squeak drowned by the spine-twisting shriek of the Famulus as Lady Flay started on the other woman’s eye.
24
Manoeuvring
(Freshly Cut Grass)
Stann Taille limped into a clearing in the Weeping Woods, slumped onto a tree stump and knuckled his half-leg with his half-hand. His thigh ached almost as much as his back hurt. Worse, he was grumpy. The trek through the Weeping Woods had been a long one and he was still feeling the after-effects of it a week later. Skovsky Senior had dropped him off and disappeared into the sky. His last shouted words over the chopper’s rotors were as fresh now as they were then: “Ray’s in trouble.”
That hurt Stann the most. He’d not been able to help his own son when the time came, and now he was too far away to help his grandson. Still. “No point whining like a rookie, get on with it. Whatever it is.” Stann pushed himself to his feet.
The clearing was full of early morning sunshine and the smell of freshly cut grass. An axe thwacked into wood. Stann’s scythe was propped up against a large wooden distiller’s barrel. He’d assumed grass-cutting duty, his prosthetic leg made the looping swing of scything relatively easy, and it was satisfying seeing the grass piling up in neat crescents around him. It was real work where you could see progress, rather than being stuffed behind a desk to turn people into numbers and crunch their lives until they balanced.
The barrel itself was shod with hoops and was big enough to sleep in. It had been converted to a hideout and an illegal still long before he was a boy. Stann had hoped to find buried treasure here: bathtub brandy courtesy of the former occupants. Nothing. It had been naive to think the spirits would remain undiscovered, even this far from civilisation. Though the more people he met, the more he felt modern life was far from civilised.
“You’re starting to sound like Rick Franklin. He always fancied himself as the thinker.” Stann hawked and spat and quickly rubbed the spittle into the ground. People lived here now. And as temporary as it was, you don’t spit in your own front room. On the green carpet of this front room were bedroll
s, cooking pans, boots and a collection of weapons that were older than he was.
After Skovsky had dropped Stann off in Tear, Stann had commandeered a vehicle and done the rounds. He’d called in favours, made promises and threats, bought drinks, bribed a few fellows and appealed to the best and worst in others. It had been less work than he’d thought. There were a lot of people who remembered the story of Greenfields: military veterans, men and women who were spoiling for a chance of payback at the government that had used and abused and discarded them when they were too broken to die so the leaders could live. As a result, Stann Taille, Tear’s rotten egg, had assembled his own little militia. They were a motley crew, to be fair, with almost as many false teeth and joints as real ones, but they were here, working and waiting.
Thwack thwack thwack
The measured sound of the axe splitting wood was slow but efficient.
“Experience over enthusiasm,” Stann mumbled. Hoping to hell that the old-timers he’d gathered wouldn’t drown in their own wrinkles before that experience could be useful. One of his crew had polished the copper hoops that banded the massive barrel until they reflected the sun’s rays back up into the sky. Others were cooking or shooting the breeze. Some were using trees as targets in an attempt to wake up their aim and lubricate their trigger fingers. It was a camp with a purpose. Old folk ready for their last chance of glory. A rehearsal for a modern-day retelling of the Greenfields story: the silver-haired militia who had ridden to save an early incarnation of the village of Tear from an army of invading knights. The modern enemy was homegrown, a much more nebulous villain than the government’s Them and Us. But these men and women had answered Stann’s call to save Tear, to save Ray.
A series of whistles and birdcalls split the air. A man limped into sight, the end of his crutch muddy. His scarred face red and sweaty.
“Long way to walk for a man with one-and-a-half legs,” Stann called over.
“You’d know,” Martinez replied.
“You got good news or bad news?”
“Bit of both.”
The thwack thwack thwack of the axe had stopped. The woman who had been chopping had wood chips on her face and sawdust in her hair. Good looking woman, Stann thought. Strong and fierce with deft, competent hands. That had always been what did it for him: competent, independent, a woman who would give as good as she got on all levels. That’s why he’d been so cut up when Thryn Ap Svet had chosen Rick Franklin over him. Seemed like a different world now. A different time. He’d had two legs back then and a whole lot more testosterone. Martinez sat on the stump Stann had just vacated.
“Give me a bit of both news, then,” Stann said, aware that all activity in the clearing was now focused on him and Martinez. The woman with the axe was plucking bits of wood out of her hair. Flayme, her name was. He didn’t care if it was a real name or an affected one. It suited her. Flayme’s gaze drifted from Martinez to Stann and his cheeks warmed. Must be the sun, catching a bit of a burn, that’s all.
“Dan Swann is dead,” Martinez said. “Died saving the rest of us in the Morgen Towers. Those rusting coffins out in the South Sea.”
“Good way to go.”
“Not good for his kids to lose their dad.”
“Better than parents losing their kids first.”
“Sorry, sir.” Martinez lapsed back into the emotional defence formality gives. “Forgot about—”
“Donarth? My son, your buddy Ray’s dad? I haven’t. Think of him every day. Not being able to bury him is the worst. A person’s death is just a comma; their grave is the full stop. That’s when you know it’s real.” He spat, not bothering to grind the phlegm into the grass. One gnarled hand took in the surrounding rebels. “We’ve all lost before our time. Ain’t nothing special about me.” The woman’s blue eyes twinkled. She’s not fooled. She can see right through me. “How’s Stella and little Emily taking it?” Stann asked hurriedly.
“Em doesn’t know what’s going on but Stella’s in a bad way. Thinks it’s all Ray’s fault. Not looking good there.”
Stann sucked on his teeth. It was times like this that he wished he hadn’t quit smoking.
“Stella, Em and Vena Laudanum are on their way to the Donian Mountains with the remnants of the Resistance’s War Council.”
Stann heard the change in Martinez’s voice. “That useless are they?”
“The Council?” Martinez snorted. “About as useful as tinfoil toilet paper.” The assembled men and women chuckled. “Or a cheese knife made of cheese.” Laughter, now. “Good news is I picked up a few others who want in. Word of your recruitment spread and these new folk must have heard Skovsky Senior dropping me off.” Martinez gestured to Stann’s militia. “My people aren’t quite as wise as those you’ve dug up.” A series of hoots and catcalls echoed round the clearing as the men and women offered to share their knuckle-shaped wisdom with young Martinez. He gave them a good-natured bow from his seat. “My lot are waiting near Axeford. There’s an old playground there, virtually rusted into the ground now.”
“I know it,” Stann said. That playground was the last time he’d seen Rick Franklin alive. “Guess we better be getting a shift on then.” Stann’s eyes landed on the woman. Had her hair been red when she was younger? It was the colour of cold steel now, glinting silver and green in the light reflected off the trees. Flayme? Would have laughed at a name like that one time. Don’t feel much like laughing now. Feel like fighting for starters. Guess this old war dog’s got more testosterone left in him than I thought. Flayme’s lips parted slightly and Stann’s pulse kicked up a gear. Yup, much more testosterone. The image of him and Flayme rolling around in the leaves together burst. “Wait,” he said to Martinez. “You said Laudanum and the Swanns are heading to Donia. Where’s—”
Ray Franklin emerged from one of the smugglers’ tunnels that ran under the walls around Ailan. They cobwebbed under the city, blocked in places by the Underwall that the authorities were building beneath the litter-strewn streets. Each time he used them, the tunnels were different, as if they were sentient, growing things that would find a way regardless of what the people did.
There was a hint of freshly mown grass in the air. And, in the distance, framed by the bright morning light, the rusting hulk of burnt-out cars. That was his destination. He’d hidden his Jeep there. It was battered but functional. Where better to hide an old car than in a scrapyard? The car would take him to the RV with Skovsky Senior. That old man seemed to be keeping the Resistance on track single-handedly. Skovsky Senior would take Ray to the Donian Mountains, where he would catch up with Laudanum, Stella and—
Brooke ran a hand over her belly. Something was squirming inside it, like a worm. It was odd, this whole pregnancy thing, bordering on unnatural. Maybe she would come to appreciate it, but at the moment she’d be damned if she could understand what was so attractive about it. A gust of cold morning air snapped through the crack in the cave ceiling. It brought with it the smell of freshly cut grass. Pushing herself to her feet, she scooped up the pen and paper off the desk and made her way to the pillars, attempting not to waddle.
She and Eddie Shaw had been making good progress in transcribing the history of the Donian people. They were looking for information about the gwenium but had found anything but.
They’d discovered that the Hoyden, the rebellious upstarts who harked back to the older, more violent traditions of Donia, had initially been pacifists. Then their leader had had a drunken fistfight over a woman. His way of saving face had been to declare that pacifism had been a mistake. Since Brooke had made that news public, Lukaz, the self-styled leader of the modern Hoyden, had been wandering around like a prophet whose god had let him down.
Brooke had read about the Northbridge, which spanned the chasm in the mountains between Mennai and Ailan. It was carved with dancing figures on one side and their skeletal counterparts on the other. The stories told her nothing more than she already knew.
The pillars explained the blood
y origins of the altar room where the Monster-under-the-Mountain had decimated her old patrol. She still found it hard not to think of the monster in any other way, even knowing who he was.
She read about the Devil under the Lion’s Crest and the winds that protected the Angel City from above.
There were tales of the Knife Queen and the Tattooed Man.
But she hadn’t discovered anything useful about the red rock, the gwenium.
The breeze whistling through the hole in the ceiling shifted. The smell of grass was replaced by the taste of dust. It brought memories of Ray, of the pair of them rolling around the Dawn Rock, grabbing, thrusting, stroking, loving and sweating over and on and in each other. Was that the moment they had created the child? Or was it the time they got lost in each other while the statues in the Waiting Room watched? She laughed and Eddie Shaw smiled at her, happy to see her happy.
The dead people within those statues had chosen to be interred to wait for the End Times. Ray and Brooke had given them a show they hadn’t bargained for. Her laugh twisted into a cackle and a swear word. She needed to piss again. Why couldn’t men get pregnant and not women? A vicious smile hit her face as she imagined Ray waddling around with a swollen belly, or Nascimento, or even better—
Baris Orr closed his eyes, feigning a calm he did not feel as the thrum of the chopper rotors deepened.
Fucking Unsung.
Fucking Franklin.
Fucking Donian.
Fucking Legions.
Fucking cancer.
That was the thing that really got him, the thing he hadn’t told anyone. Why bother? So he could hear platitudes about how he was a fighter and he could beat this? Crap. You don’t beat this. You get no choice. You’re just the host. It lets you live or it beats you.
There was a part of him that wasn’t surprised. About the disease? Yes. About an early demise? Less so. He’d never been able to imagine himself as an old man. His imagination was limited at best but it had never let him see himself past midthirties. His imagination was right.
