The Strategist

by Gerrard Cowan

  The Strategist

  GERRARD COWAN

  HarperVoyager

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street,

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2017

  Copyright © Gerrard Cowan 2017

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017.

  Cover image © Shutterstock.com

  Gerrard Cowan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

  Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008121822

  Version: 2017-08-09

  For my parents, Marie and Ronnie, and my sister, Rosaleen

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  About the Author

  Also by Gerrard Cowan

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  ‘What is the Machinery?’ the man asked.

  There was silence for a moment, and then a great sigh, somewhere far away.

  The man opened his eyes, to a black, starless expanse. He was alone, held up by invisible strings: a puppet in the abyss.

  The man flexed his fingers. He reached up to his face, felt the stubble, and confirmed he was what he had always been: Charls Brandione. A physical being. Not a nothing.

  He looked into the dark, and searched for her.

  The Dust Queen.

  ‘Ask me another question,’ she said.

  It was strange, that voice of hers: three people speaking at once, and one voice from three mouths. He sensed she was impatient, and the thought sent a spasm of laughter through him. How could he hold such power over her?

  He turned his head, focused on another stretch of darkness. She had taken him here before, many times. What was this place? It was a void, yet there was something there, in the darkness: a deep intelligence, like that of the Queen, but older even than her, its thoughts stretching across age after age. He could feel it. He could hear the whispers of its greatness. There was a conflict within this unknowable mind; he could taste it.

  The darkness changed. Three sets of unblinking eyes appeared before him.

  ‘Ask me another question.’ The eyes narrowed. He could ignore her no longer. But only one question ever came to mind. It was a question she would not answer, but it mattered more than anything else. Everything was tied up with it: the old world and whatever had taken its place; the rules they lived by, all their fears and dreams.

  ‘What is the Machinery?’

  The eyes blinked.

  **

  He was back in his tent.

  No: not tent. He had been in many tents before, in the wars. The wars, the wars, the endless wars, now a bloody dream. This was a great hall, a monstrosity of flowing silk, dyed into violent shades of red and gold. In the centre stood a magnificent table, covered with maps of the Machinery knew where and bowls of fruit in a riot of colours. Candles burned on thick iron stands, and a gigantic bed dominated one wall. Along another was a series of wooden shelves, groaning with incomprehensible books. Brandione sat at a gleaming mahogany desk, the knobs on its drawers shaped into likenesses of his own face. In a corner was a bust of the Queen, or rather three busts growing from one base, staring at him with wicked intent.

  Wayward was standing before him, smiling his usual smile. Tonight he wore a velvet coat of dark purple; shreds of cloth of the same colour were threaded through the braids of his hair.

  Brandione turned his gaze to the entrance, a flapping segment of parchment. Outside, the sand was cold and blue in the moonlight. There was a desert, there. Was it the Wite? He did not know. Questions, Wayward, and the tent. That’s all there is. Questions, Wayward, and the tent.

  ‘You were gone for a long time,’ Wayward said.

  His accent was familiar to Brandione, echoing with the heavy cadences of the South. My old home, in an old land. But it could not be so, for Wayward was surely an ancient thing. Perhaps he alters his voice to put his companions at ease.

  Brandione shrugged. ‘No longer than usual.’ He looked down at the desk, and saw that his hands were intertwined. There was a small scar on his thumb from some unknown wound. For a moment he was jolted back to reality, to his old self: the commander of the armies of the Overland. But those days were gone, now. He was no longer a General. What are you, then?

  ‘You are the soldier and the scholar,’ Wayward whispered.

  Brandione met the courtier’s eye. Wayward had been there from the beginning. The General had been taken prisoner, accused of murdering the Strategist and three Tacticians, and sent to the Prison. He suppressed a bubble of laughter. I fought to declare my innocence. But in the end, it didn’t matter. I was always going in the same direction: to her.

  He had met her in the Prison of the Doubters, in a tower in the sun. She had formed before his eyes, taking her shape from mounds of sand, coalescing into three beings: three women with one voice. He tried to picture her, in his mind, but the image was broken, incomplete, a thing of red and black and grey and white, a thing of glass crowns, a thing of mighty thrones. The Dust Queen.

  She had been expecting him. The Last Doubter, she called him. A soldier and a scholar. She had enveloped him, shown him things he could not comprehend, strange things from other places, abandoned cities and broken fortresses. He saw the Strategist, in shadows and towers: the new Strategist, the one that had been prophesied. She had taken the form of a girl he recognised, a girl he had searched for long ago, in that strange museum …

  The Queen always told him to ask a question, and threw him back here, t
o Wayward, when he asked the same one, over and over and over again.

  Wayward. What is he? A guide, on this journey. The man who led him through the Queen. The one who steered him in the right direction.

  ‘Did you ask her the same question again?’ the courtier asked. There was an edge of impatience in his voice.

  Brandione looked away for a moment. Outside, in the desert, a person had appeared. It was a man, but it was not a man. It was a creature, formed of sand, wearing a yellow cloak, holding a glass spear. He was one of the Queen’s soldiers, a member of the army Brandione had seen in the Prison of the Doubters. Her army, for him to command, she had said: his army of dust.

  There was a gust of dry wind, and the soldier disappeared.

  Brandione turned his attention again to Wayward. He nodded at the courtier, who frowned back.

  ‘What is the Machinery?’ Wayward asked. There was mockery in his words. He turned from the desk, and made his way to a golden sofa, throwing himself down and spreading out his lengthy frame. ‘She will not answer that question. Do you know why?’

  ‘No.’

  Wayward sighed. ‘It is not a good question. It is too … precise. The Queen is old indeed. She thinks in …’ Wayward screwed his eyebrows together, and clicked his tongue in his mouth. ‘How to describe it? How to describe eternity?’ He smiled. ‘She thinks in great, sweeping, movements.’ He accompanied each word with a swing of an elegant arm. ‘Her thoughts are the circuits of the stars. Her wishes are the birth of mountains. She is the sun, hmm? She is the moon.’

  Wayward cast a glance at Brandione, who did not attempt to hide his incomprehension. The courtier giggled.

  ‘I am … what is the word? I am pretentious.’ He giggled. ‘I’m young, you know, very young, compared to the others. I have to make up for it by appearing knowledgeable.’ He grinned.

  Brandione nodded. ‘Tell me in small words. I’m just a soldier.’

  Wayward grimaced and raised a finger. ‘And a scholar. A soldier and a scholar. The Last Doubter: a man the Queen saw long ago.’ He waved his hands above his head, as if scrabbling there for the right words. ‘The Queen will only answer what she wants to answer, or what is proper for her to answer. However, she does want to answer. The more specific your question, the more precise you are, the less chance there is that she will respond. But if you are nice and general, then she will speak to you, for she can twist your question as she wishes. Hmm?’

  Brandione nodded. ‘I think I understand.’

  Wayward nodded. ‘Good. I am not surprised. For you are not just a soldier. You are a soldier …’

  The tent began to fade away before Wayward could finish.

  **

  He was back in the blackness.

  ‘Question.’

  The voice filled the void, the word echoing into the blackness. The eyes were no longer to be seen.

  The one-time General searched for a question. There was something pathetic about him, this ridiculous animal, suspended in a world of higher beings, scrabbling around in his fleshy brain for something to say. In his days as a scholar – the days before soldiering, the days before the end of the world – he had read about ancient cultures. They were hives of ignorance, he had been taught, where people saw gods in the trees and the rivers. In some of the old stories, these people had met with their gods, conversed with them as equals, and even tricked them. Here he was, now, playing that same role. He was no different to the savages who walked the Plateau in the days before the Machinery.

  But we were never any different, were we? The thought burst to life like a black weed. What was the Operator, if not a god? What was the Machinery?

  Her eyes were before him again, no longer angry but hungry, waiting for him to speak. A god, and her mortal. But there were no tricks to be played here. Not with her.

  Nice and general.

  He opened his mouth, and the eyes widened.

  ‘What comes next?’ he asked.

  The eyes widened. The darkness around them was slowly replaced with the outlines of three faces, and in a heartbeat she was before him, shining in her glory. She had taken a youthful appearance, her hair falling in golden curls, her cheeks rosy and unblemished. She wore three silver dresses, lengthy garments of a gleaming material, shining with the light of the stars and studded with tiny black stones. She grinned at him with three red mouths. She seemed more substantial than usual, though streams of dust fell away from the tips of her fingers.

  She was beautiful, but she faded from his mind as soon as he turned away from her, like the memories she showed him. He closed his eyes and the image of her vanished, with only the outline remaining, only the sense of her. But when he opened them again, she was there, more terrifying and radiant and impossible than before.

  ‘That,’ the Dust Queen said, ‘is a good question.’

  Smiles broke out across her three youthful faces, and she raised her hands. The dust at the edge of her fingers began to flow more quickly, falling away into the ether. In a moment she had disintegrated into sand. It swirled forward, encircling Brandione, and he heard her voice in his own mind.

  A game.

  **

  He opened his eyes, and the darkness had gone.

  They were on a beach, of sorts, but unlike any the former General had ever seen. The sand beneath his feet was black, and the sun in the dark sky was blood red. The water of the sea beyond crashed rhythmically against the shore, over and over, like the movements of a machine. The air here was cold, and still, and deadening.

  ‘Where are we?’

  The Queen was by his side. She seemed smaller, somehow.

  ‘The Old Place,’ she said. ‘The Underland. Two of the names it has been given, over the long years.’ One of her figures knelt down, and scooped up some of the black sand in a hand. She lifted the sand up, and shared it with the other two. All of them held it in the air, and allowed it to drop from their fingers.

  ‘Why is the sand black?’ Brandione asked.

  A moment passed, before the Dust Queen answered.

  ‘It is not truly sand,’ she said. ‘It is a memory. Or more than one, perhaps, fused together, and residing here in the Old Place.’

  ‘Sand is not black. And the sun is not red.’

  The Dust Queen raised her eyebrows. ‘Have you seen all sand, my Last Doubter? Have you seen every beach since the beginning of the world?’ She pointed her three right hands at the burning orb above. ‘Have you witnessed every age of that star? Do you know what it was in its youth?’

  Brandione shook his head.

  ‘No,’ said the Queen. ‘But the Old Place does.’ She sighed. ‘Do you know what it is?’

  ‘The home of the Machinery.’

  The Queen laughed. ‘Yes, yes.’ She pinched three forefingers and three thumbs tightly together, and raised them to her eyes. ‘But only for a sliver of its lifespan: the most recent moments in its long years.’

  Brandione blinked, and suddenly the three bodies surrounded him, her faces inches from his own.

  ‘Everything in this place is a memory,’ she said. She gestured at the beach around them. ‘Memories have power, because humanity was made to die, to burn in beauty and flutter out, in wave after glorious wave.’ She pointed to the sea. ‘The creator hated that: how could he not, when he would live forever?’

  ‘The creator?’ He thought of the endless chasm, and the intelligence he had felt there, that sense of conflict.

  She ignored him.

  ‘He wanted something to remain: something of each of them, something that would not die. He took mortal memories, and gave them power to make them last forever, so he would always have them to play with.’ She smiled. ‘It was his great mistake. The immortal power he placed in memories grew beyond even his control. Something new emerged: a thing that could rival even him.’ She glanced around, with a blend of love and fear in her eyes. ‘This place.’

  She sighed. The three young women flickered into something else: old creatures,
balding and stooped, their skin lined and fragile. But the moment passed, and the young Dust Queen returned, staring sadly at the sands.

  Brandione looked from this creature of three bodies, to the red sun, then down to the black sand at his feet. Thoughts of the past appeared in his mind, unbidden memories rushing through him in a flood. He thought of his days in the College, and then the army. He looked back on his unrelenting ascent to the top of the Overland’s military hierarchy, his role as Strategist Kane’s senior advisor, and all the things that once seemed weighty in his mind. He was a man of many parts, someone had once told him. He was ambitious, but not boastful: popular with those above and below him, but not a craver of adulation. He had seemed a quiet and modest man, but, in truth, he revelled in his complexity. They never saw him coming, because they did not know what to make of him. A soldier and a scholar.

  He looked to his left, and for a moment he caught a glimpse of a figure from his past: Provost Hone, the head of the College. The old man was standing far away, beside a towering black dune. He smiled, and Brandione was reminded of all the love he had been shown by men like that, all the counsel they had given him, all the ways they had lifted him up, and propelled him to glory.

  But Hone began to fade away, until only his smile was left, hanging ludicrously in the air. It disappeared, and Brandione was reminded that the past was dead, and he was here now, with a three-bodied creature from ancient times, on a beach from a memory, and that none of the things he had accomplished mattered any more.

  ‘Memories,’ the Queen said. She shook her three heads.

  Something new had appeared at the Queen’s side. It was a table, a circular thing formed of a dark green stone, surrounded by great wooden chairs that seemed to have grown straight out of the sand. Brandione approached it, and looked upon its surface. A vortex of shapes and symbols twisted before him, dancing across the stone, laughing at his ignorance in an ancient and unknowable tongue.