by Andy Graham
Bethina’s gaze strayed to the back of a cavern where Randall could hear a snuffling noise akin to a dog. “And I heard rumours there was someone here,” Bethina said. “Someone I thought was dead. Someone I would give anything for, even letting my sister rule in my place.”
“What? What are you talking about? Who? A person? That means— No. Not you. Love? You would give up your career for love?” Voices were chittering in his head, crawling under his skin.
“Not when I was younger. Now? Yes. Someone else can lead Ailan; maybe someone else should have. No one is irreplaceable, except here.” She laid a hand over her heart.
Realisation was slowly dawning on some of the people around her. The damp chill of the evening crept into the cave. The noises were louder now. They could all hear the shuffling of feet, the heavy breathing. Stann Taille’s brilliant eyes shone. “You’re telling me he’s here, alive?”
Bethina didn’t seem to have heard. “A rumour is all. A chance to try again. A chance for a lover to redeem herself.”
A tall man, olive-skinned, with thick sideburns that blended with a mess of tousled black and silver hair emerged from the back of the cave. “Shaw?” Chester said. “But—”
“You were deformed by the gwenium,” Randall shouted. He sank his head into his hands. Thoughts of revenge, of control, of the pistol subsumed in the creak of his world shifting.
Professor Shaw took Brooke’s free hand. Her other was squeezed around Ray’s waist. The delicate threads of rock in the cave pulsed, lighting the scene up in shades of crimson and amber. The creature that emerged from the shadows was uglier then any of the things Randall’s scientists had managed to create. Twisted by time and ravaged by both the darkness of the caves and the element they held. Sores weeped openly on blistered skin. Its eyes were black and rheumy. The bones warped.
“Fuck me.” Nascimento reached for his rifle.
“Easy, Nasc,” Ray said. “He’s not going to hurt us.”
“He? Not it? Dude? What—”
Brooke stamped on his foot.
“What was that for?”
She nodded towards Bethina. Bethina Laudanum was crying. The creature pulled a necklace out from under its torn shirt. At the end of it was a coin, buckled and bent. “Is it really you?” She asked and the creature answered by tracing a circle in the dust with a hoof-like foot. As Bethina held a hand to her mouth, the Monster-under-the-Mountain added two dots and a smile to his picture. “It is you.”
A swollen tongue tried to force out words that couldn’t be said. Its head bowed and Bethina threw her arms round the Monster-under-the-Mountain. She pulled it tight. The thing’s skin split under her embrace.
Stann Taille gasped. “Rick?”
“Rick who? Rick Franklin? Your dead grandfather?” Nascimento asked.
“My grandfather.” With an uncharacteristic smirk, Ray said to Randall, “Our grandfather.”
“Rick died in the uranium mines.”
Randall wasn’t sure who had said it: Nascimento, Stann, the beast even? They were all swimming in air that looked like it had escaped from a furnace.
“He was sent to the mines, Stann,” Bethina said from the embrace. “Your son, Donarth, broke him out.”
“That’s not the story I was told.” Stann took a half-step forwards, halfway to the thing they were calling Rick Franklin. He turned to Bethina in disbelief. “Rose told me Donarth walked out on her when she was pregnant with Ray. The Legions told me he was shot for being a deserter.”
“I assume it was safer for Rose not to know where Donarth was going,” Bethina said. “Donarth broke Rick out of the mines but was shot in the process.” A rumble from the creature’s chest spread through the cave. The thing pointed to the back of his head. “The lie about the desertion must have been spread to keep other soldiers in line and to maintain the illusion the uranium mines were impregnable. I tracked down an old guard turned tree surgeon, man by the name of Simek. He worked on my Folly Tree and was incapable of working without talking. Like many older folk, he couldn’t remember what he had for breakfast today but could have told you what the weather was like on any day thirty years ago.”
Randall edged to the left, his life spinning around the pistol pressing into his skin. Now? They’re distracted. Should I shoot or run? Lukaz’s pink-tinted eyes met Randall’s odd-coloured ones. Randall lowered his head. Play dead. Delay.
“My dad didn’t desert Mum?” Ray asked softly.
Bethina freed herself from Rick’s grip. Her black coat was smudged with yellow pus. “No.”
“Did you tell Rose this?”
“I wasn’t sure it was true. I didn’t want to get her hopes up with a lie and . . .” Her voice broke. “Rose and I had a combative relationship at best, and I was so sunk in the mire of playing political games that I kept that back in case I needed it. I was wrong.”
“I knew it!” Stann let out a whoop of joy. He grabbed Chester by the shoulders and planted a huge kiss on her lips. Chester stared at him as if she had been slapped. “I knew my boy would never let me down like this!”
As the sound of Stann’s happiness echoed down the cave, Professor Shaw said, “There’s more, Beth. Tell them. They have a right to know.”
“What?” both of Rose’s sons said at once, both clamping their mouths shut as they realised what had happened.
“How do you know?” Bethina’s face drained of colour.
“I stumbled across an old project Professors Wu-Brocker and Lind had been working on,” Shaw said. “When James ‘Laceration’ Lind caught me, and knowing that Wu-Brocker was still alive, after a fashion, and working, I thought it best I disappear. I’d been considering leaving and didn’t think my family would be safe after my discovery. Maybe I should have stayed. They died anyway.”
“Tell us what, Bethina?” Ray demanded just before Randall shouted: “What other lie do you have for us, woman?”
Bethina gathered her coat around her, took a deep breath in and rushed out the words: “I had Lind and Wu-Brocker insert some of my DNA into Rose Franklin when she came in for the first round of pregnancy tests with you, Randall. Rose had the same genetic condition that Professor Lind’s daughters suffered from, the one that kills pregnant women and their offspring. The trial on Rose was one of the earlier attempts to deal with it. It worked but, unfortunately for him and others, Lind could never reliably reproduce the results. Rose and a smattering of others were the only successes. He tried and tried, long after the project had been officially shelved. It consumed him in camp X517. I suspect that wherever he disappeared to after you trashed that place, Ray, he is still working on finding a solution.”
She leant into the twisted shape of Rick Franklin. It was an odd look, an elderly woman being comforted by a thing from everyone’s nightmares. He wrapped one arm round her, she seemed to fit the space perfectly.
“Lind,” Beth said, glancing up at Rick in a manner that was almost shy, “suspected that the introduction of my DNA into Rose’s genome is why the experimental drug that was designed for Rose to have one baby, and one baby only, failed. We had no proof but it’s the only vaguely credible theory there is. It may explain why Rose went on to have Ray and Rhys, the twins.”
“Why did you volunteer?” Ray asked. “You hated my mother.”
“At times, yes. But I made a promise to protect her,” Beth said. This time, when she looked up at Rick’s ruined face, she had tears in her eyes. “I never wanted my own family, my duty to the country came first, and I’ve always had an innate aversion to the chaos that only a child can produce.” She smiled to herself. “This way meant any children Rose had would be part mine. This solution worked for everyone.”
Solution? Randall thought, the pistol burning ice cold against his skin. She is part of me? She and Prothero and Rose and their unholy, diseased genes are part of me? His skin felt like it was boiling, countless minuscule knives stabbing at every part of him. He wanted to rip it off, peel off every layer of skin and fat and
flesh until he could get at the filth curdling in every cell. How could a person live with themselves knowing they were made from the people they most despised? There wasn’t enough forgiveness or acceptance in the world to deal with this. And for one, feverish moment, Randall wondered if Wu-Brocker, Lady Flay, could do the impossible and remove all traces of those people who had made him from him. The pain would be eternal, as would Wu-Brocker’s enthusiasm for the task. Randall, teeth gritting so hard he cracked one, thought the price worth paying.
Beth pushed herself away from Rick, even now appearing not to want to take shelter from anyone. She pushed on. There was an urgency to her words, as if she were pressed for time. “I’ve always consoled myself with the fact that the pettiness of my wanting to share Rose’s children was outweighed by the fact she and her children survived the pregnancies when so many others didn’t. I never thought one of those children would kill her.” Quiet as they were, the last words rang round the cave as the listeners watched, open-mouthed. A distant drip of water marked time as the mountain air sat heavy and still.
“You’re my mother?” Ray said finally, the shock and surprise echoing the revulsion crawling through Randall.
“In a manner of speaking. Yours, too, Randall. One reason I let you run for so long, Ray; one reason why I kept you in government for so long, Randall.”
Randall could hear the words. He could almost see them: fiery letters that hung in the air like fireworks, crackling and spitting and pissing light. The headache that was threatening to swallow him contracted down to a pinprick of pain and, with a thick knot of anger boiling just below his belly button, Randall addressed the onlookers. “Well, isn’t this one big happy family? Two grandfathers, two grandchildren, one great-grandchild on the way, and a spiderous never-mother stuck in the middle of a web she has been using to control people for generations. No more!”
He pulled the pistol from under his shirt. The weapon was larger than what he was used to but it fit his palm perfectly. For a man who had rarely shot a gun, once being at his mother, his aim was good. Straight at his brother, the man who had been the focus of his ire for so many years. Randall’s problems with Bethina were newer. Rick was so deformed he didn’t count. And the calculating part of Randall’s brain that Bethina had admired for so long thought that killing Ray would inflict maximum emotional damage on the most number of people. The thoughts flashed through his mind in under a second, long enough for Bethina Laudanum to step calmly in the way of the bullet that was meant for Ray.
It entered her forehead. Ripped a hole in the back of her skull. Coating Ray Franklin in slime and splinters of bone. There was no time for last words. No time for regrets. No time for the redemption she sought. Bethina Laudanum was dead before she hit the floor, the puppeteer killed by one of her puppets.
Randall fled, spinning past outstretched arms, ducking under grasping hands. He bounced off the chest of the lumbering beast, pulled the bent coin off its leather strap and ripped away a handful of flesh. Randall ran like he had never run. Away from the light and into the womb-like darkness of the cave. The roars and shouts behind him bled into one another. Punctuated by the retort of a rifle and the answering rumble of the mountain. He didn’t believe the Donian myths, but he wondered if the Devil of the Lion’s Crest was laughing or crying at what had happened. Randall did both. He had no idea where he was going, slipping and sliding on the slick rock floor. He just fled along the corridors. One hand clutched the coin so hard his fingertips were going numb. The other traced the red seams that were getting smaller and thinner.
Then there was darkness.
Then he was lost.
Alone.
39
Lenka
Stann’s back groaned at him as he shunted the chair back from the desk. “Ergonomically designed my arse, it’s making you soft, Taille.” The chair wheeled away, past a paper shredder that was older than he was, and he resumed his hunt. “Where is the damn thing?” He lifted a sheaf of papers. Nothing. Not even the old adage of ‘if you can’t find something, it’s under something else’ worked. He’d turned his sleek new office upside down but couldn’t find the desk sign that had been here when he moved in.
“I am the chairman. I get the chair,” it had read. It had belonged to Randall Soulier and had amused Stann enough to want to keep it. Only now, the sign was gone. Stann flicked through the jigsaw of paper that formed a crude drawing of Captain Electric, checked inside the old paper shredder, and looked in the drawers again. Empty as a cot-death crib, as they said in the Free Towns.
“Someone’s nicked it, I’ll bet,” Stann said, and the door swished open.
“You took Chester’s offer, then?” A woman’s voice. “Full pension, backdated?”
“Guess I did.” He nodded his agreement.
“Did you get the posthumous pardon for your son?”
“For Donarth?”
“Yes.” Flayme elbowed him in the ribs, an irritating habit she’d picked up in the Donian Mountains. “Unless you’ve got another son you’ve not told me about?”
“One was enough. He was a good kid, a better man than I could ever be.” Stann gave up his hunt for the desk sign and slid open a window.
They were high up in what had been the VP’s tower, Lesau Tower. A wind burst into the room and tousled Flayme’s silvered hair. Far below, Effrea glittered in the early-morning sun. The city was waking up to the raucous caw of the fisher gulls hunting. Flecks of light danced on the river, from the up-lit towers of the Brick Cathedral to the shadows of the giant walls on the outskirts. On the wall-screens within the room itself, Stann was playing static images of his rundown cottage in Tear. The contrast between his old home, held together with duct tape, nails and hope, and an office full of tech that was not yet available to the general public appealed to him. It also pissed off a whole bunch of people, which was always a bonus. They thought it unbecoming in ‘a man of his new-found position.’ Pretentious idiots. Some tech kid who looked like his parents had been clothes mannequins had told Stann the wall-screens were ‘touch sensitive and fully interactive.’ The boy had gone on to say something which might as well have been in Dog, for all Stann understood. So he’d stopped listening and got the lacquered toerag to pull up the images of his old home. They were familiar, comforting. It’s just for a while, he thought, until my old bones got used to all the changes.
Flayme looped her arm through Stann’s, jolting him back to the moment. “Donarth got his pardon,” he said. “Got a posthumous promotion, too. Got a whole lot of posthumous pomp and pampering that’s not going to bring him back, is it? Just more spit and polish for the legions to suck in more preposthumous kids.”
“He didn’t die for the army; he died for Rick Franklin.”
Stann held up his ruined hand. The stretched skin on the stumps of his thumb and forefinger gleamed. “That man has taken a lot from my family.”
“He is your family.”
“I know, Flayme, I know. I just spent so much time hating him it’s become a piece of me, replaced the space in my head my fingers and leg used to fill. Gonna take a little while to work that out, is all.”
Flayme slipped her free hand under his shirt, fingers teasing his skin. “Want some help?”
“Already?”
“Already.”
The dull thud of a chopper’s rotors filled the air. A burst of air sent a series of papers on Stann’s new desk see-sawing in the air. Flayme giggled as Stann swore at the machine for ruining another perfect moment in this young lady’s life.
The helicopters had been an unusual sight in the skies of Ailan since Chester had taken power. To her advisors’ annoyance, she was taking a more subtle approach to security around the senior politicians. She claimed the people would respect a leader who was prepared to meet them face to face more, rather than one who would only appear behind police lines to a select audience with prepared questions. “You don’t need to fear assassins if you don’t give them something they want to kill,
” she’d said to a gaggle of gawping politicians. Naive as it was, it seemed to be working. So far.
“If you want no part of the Legions’ spit and polish, why did you accept Chester’s job offer?” Flayme asked as she finished stacking the paper. The first time she had seen all that paper in one place, she had refused to touch it for fear of it being a mirage. Now she handled it as if there had never been an unofficial ban on the stuff for almost fifty years. Amazing how quickly you could get used to things. Amazing how quickly Stann had got used to his new job.
“Counsel to the Legions.” Stann rubbed the golden tree embroidered into his shirt. “No one does pretentious like Chester. But she’s a good soldier and she knows her limits. I’m to be her conscience, to tell her when her pretentiousness is slipping from tedious into dangerous, to tell her what the toadies won’t.”
“And Martinez?”
“Managing the Kickshaw. Picking up where Lynn left off. He didn’t want to put on a legionnaire’s uniform again. They offered him an ambassador’s post in the schools but he’s still young enough to remember what it was like to have both legs and his old face. When you’ve lived with this” — Stann’s ruined hand pointed to his half-leg — “for as long as I have, you stop making comparisons to how life was. The what-ifs stopped a long time ago for me; Martinez’s loss is still fresh.”
The thud of the rotor blades faded across the river, disappearing into a pall of smoke that hung over the old city of Tye like a shroud. Parts of it still smouldered from the fires that had spread from the tunnels under the Bridged Quarter.
“Less than a month back I was in a rat-piss-soaked dungeon and now I have quarters next to the acting president of Ailan. Funny how life works.”
“Do you think Chester will ever claim the presidency properly?”
“In name? No. In practice, we’ll see. But, to date, she has been true to her word and is facilitating a handover to a genuinely elected leader. Preferably one who gets a true majority.”
