The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children)

by Manda Benson

  Over the drone of the fan, footfall became audible on the concrete floor somewhere outside the entrance to the room. Someone was coming.

  Dana got up and stood back against the corner between the wall and a shelf, in the place she hoped she’d be least conspicuous. Now it might be too late. She should have gone when she’d had the chance, not come in here where she could be trapped.

  As the sound of people approaching grew louder, she sensed something else, familiar but from where she couldn’t pin down.

  A signal...

  And suddenly, the memories from the dreams she’d been having all came flooding back. Gamma, Pilgrennon’s third child, trapped in the nightmare, trying to escape. It wasn’t Pilgrennon who had led her here. It wasn’t a hidden memory the wyvern had implanted in her. It had been Gamma all along, reaching out to her through the dreams, and she needed Dana’s help. Dana quickly thought to her, Gamma, it’s me, Epsilon. I've come to help you. Keep still and don't do anything to draw attention to me.

  Someone stepped into view from the doorway, and Dana found herself face to face with the girl in the mirror in the dream, the girl who had stabbed herself with the razor and bled all over the floor even though Dana had tried to stop her. She looked rather older than she had in the dream, like a girl who should be in the year above Dana at school, and the recognition in her expression was mixed with disbelief, and something that might even be fear.

  A man rushed into the gap between the shelves. With an awful sense of déjà vu, Dana realised his face was also familiar, although she couldn’t remember in precisely what way — one of the doctors or nurses from that awful hospital, no doubt. He made a lunge for Dana and caught her wrist, and a deluge of memories from Gamma’s dreams, of rough hands grabbing and forcing, rushed to consciousness. Dana threw herself forward into him, and he stumbled back, catching his feet on the dead tiger on the floor. Dana stamped with all the force she could muster on the top of the pathetic beast’s head, and its jaw slammed on the man’s foot. He shouted out in pain as its fangs perforated his shoe.

  Somewhere in front of her, an eagle screamed. “Prendick!” Gamma shouted. Dana looked up. The blind man loomed in the door, the great bird held aloft on his hand, its wings spread for balance. She crouched down and made a dash for the space between his legs, but as though guided by an almost supernatural sense, he reached to intercept her escape.

  “Gamma!” she shouted at the girl, who stood there looking shocked and yet did nothing either to escape or to help her as the two men restrained her. “Gamma, it’s Epsilon, remember? We’re going to go together, remember? I’m going to help you find the Emerald Forge!”

  Gamma stared at Epsilon as the two men held her up. She had the same wavy honey-coloured hair as Dana remembered, and she gave off a signal as distinctive and alive as did Cale and Peter, but she wasn’t dressed in the sterile hospital clothes Dana had remembered her wearing. She wore ordinary teenager clothes: marine combat trousers with a vest top and an unbuttoned shirt, and thin slippers. Dana could sense the incredulity in her signal and expression, and then she did something Cale and Peter had never done. From the signal Dana could sense from her, conscious words took form.

  But you only exist in my head?

  As soon as it happened, Gamma’s expression changed to fury. She forced Dana out of her mind. “This is the Emerald Forge!”

  -7-

  THE two men dragged Dana along, her feet tripping and scraping on the ground as she struggled against them, back out into the corridor and down a similarly dingy stairwell. At the bottom, Gamma pushed briskly past them and threw open a door that led to a long high-ceilinged room, perhaps where once heavy steam-driven machinery had been situated, around which men in old-fashioned clothes might have toiled. The sudden movement set up a flurry of wings as a number of birds who had been roosting up high on the rafters flapped a startled exit through gaps in another mullioned window at the far end, also algae-stained and with some panes missing, and spanning the whole height of the room. The sunset streamed through in long shafts of green and red light, like abstract stained glass. Light fell upon grimy brickwork and aged wooden benches bearing glass containers and metal spoons and devices, like the equipment in Science lessons at school.

  Dana had little chance to get a clear look at the clutter, and it passed as more of a vague impression as the two men hauled her down to the far end, where an old ceramic basin stood in the middle of the floor before the window, like a font in a cathedral. What immediately struck her as peculiar was that the basin didn’t appear to be plumbed in to anything. There were no taps, and the tarnished copper pipe beneath it stopped short a foot or so from the floor.

  The larger man pinioned Dana’s arms behind her back while the other tugged Duncan’s jacket with the heavy metal badges off her. Heavy hands on her shoulders forced her knees to the concrete floor. “What are you doing?” Dana shouted. She looked to Gamma, who stood aside watching, her face blank. Dana could make nothing out of the signal she gave off. She tried to find a wLAN, a phone switched on, anything that she could use to get help, but there was nothing.

  The slighter man made a grab for her wrists and Dana sank her fingernails as hard as she could into the tendons in the back of his hand. He hissed through his teeth as he yanked his hand back, raising and opening it behind his head, and before Dana had any time to react, the flat of his palm hit her full in the face and she fell back onto the other man. The light from the window became distorted and unintelligible, and by the time she had recovered from the stunning blow, the man had pulled both her arms across the basin and strapped her wrists down to the other side of it with buckled cuffs of thick leather.

  He turned and grabbed something from a nearby table, and when he bent over her again in one deft movement, something scratched Dana’s forearm hard, and it was only when blood welled quickly from a puncture in her skin and spilled over the side of her arm that she felt the stinging pain the contact left behind and realised it had been a blade. She yelled a wordless scream of panic at him as he stabbed the point of the knife into her other arm, but she could not move her arms and she could not rise from the floor. Her heart pounded and the breath tore in and out of her as she helplessly watched the blood that kept her alive running out and down over the crazed ceramic surface of the glaze and through a hole at the base of the bowl. She had made the wrong choice, and now she was going to pay for it with her life. They were going to kill her here today, and she would never see Pauline or Graeme or Cale again, never see Jananin on the news or find out what happened to the wyvern or if Ivor was still alive. And they would all be sad because she was dead, and she had only herself to blame.

  The slight man bent down and retrieved something from under the basin― a beaker half-filled with thick red liquid. He carried it to a bench and began methodically setting up a microscope, applying a tiny drop of the blood to a glass slide with a pipette. After a moment he spoke, although his words meant little and they were distorted as though she was hearing them down a long tunnel. “Positive for the moiety.”

  She caught sight of the faceless man again, the eagle peering down hungrily at the blood from his shoulder, but the light and colour from the windows were fading. The blood staining the basin no longer looked red, and prickling static was encroaching from the edges of her vision, blotting the world out. A numb oblivion was creeping up her limbs and into her chest and head. She struggled to fight it, to keep her eyes open, to hold onto her memory of Ivor and the thought of Pauline and Graeme at home waiting for her to come back, but the darkness came for her anyway.

  *

  Dana awoke lying on her stomach, in a hazy confusion in which she didn’t recall where she was or how she’d got here. A torrid heat pressed her down against a hard mattress. She turned her head, coarse fabric scratching against her cheek. Her mouth burned and her tongue seemed as though it was coated with soggy felt. Her forearms were stiff and oddly numb, and when she looked she realised they had been bound
with scraps of cream fabric. It was only then that she remembered the room with the great window, the blood pouring out...

  A square hole in a concrete wall, blocked off with rusting bars and with little of the glass that had occupied the outer side remaining, cast a rectangle of midsummer sun onto the floor.

  She reached down and put her hand in her jeans pocket. Ivor’s watch and the fuses were still there, although they’d taken Duncan’s jacket with the mobile phone in it. They had taken her wellies away as well, although she had no idea why, and she was lying on the bed in her clothes and socks.

  Something smelt, like dirty little animals in a pet shop. In the far corner above the wall with the window on, a splatter of black deposits covered the floor. On the ceiling directly above hung three or four leathery cocoons, bigger than Dana’s fist, but not quite as large as an adult’s. As she stared at them, they occasionally squirmed to reveal glimpses of ears and furry heads, or made low twittering sounds.

  Against the opposite wall was a lavatory pan with no lid, and on a table next to it stood a metal pitcher and a battered old glass. Water...

  She gripped the side of the mattress and hauled her feet off the bed and onto the floor. Sitting upright sent a wave of vertigo crashing through her head, and the room spun for a moment. After her dizziness had eased, she tried getting to her feet and moving slowly towards the pitcher, but everything swayed so much she ended up crouching down and making her way across the floor on hands and knees. She managed to get the glass down off the table and stand it on the floor. She had to hold the jug in both hands and her arms shook so much it spilled dark splashes on the floor all around the glass. She drank one glass, not caring about the lukewarm taste or the shaking of her hand that some of it overflowed her mouth and ran down her front, and then another, and then half of a third. Then she put the glass on the floor and crawled back to the bed, not caring when she saw the mattress was covered only by a pillow in a filthy case and a scratchy woollen blanket.

  She lay there and breathed for several minutes before the weak dizzy feeling subsided. She needed to do something, she needed to think, and although she sought for a signal, there was nothing. These concrete walls must have been full of metal rods, a Faraday cage as well as a prison. When she looked down at the foot of the bed, the only exit was barred by a riveted metal door with a tiny grate for a window.

  She must have drifted into sleep, because the next thing she knew, someone was outside the door, and a key was scraping in the lock.

  The slight man entered, pushing the door shut behind him. He stood beside it and watched Dana, like a zookeeper who had come into the enclosure of a fierce animal to give it medicine or some such thing. “Get up.”

  When Dana didn’t move, he strode over to the side of the bed and grabbed her arm. “Get up!” He dragged her up and off the bed, and the room became a careering imbalance of confusion. The man pulled her back out through the door. Blood sang in Dana’s ears and she couldn’t see straight, but she made out a corridor with other doors leading off it, like a prison ward. The barred door beside the one to the room she had been in revealed a similar cell, and somebody lay on the bed within, a boy, and the instant she saw him she sensed something familiar, not of his appearance, but a signal...

  “Peter?”

  The boy swivelled to face the entrance at the mention of his name. Dana caught sight of him only for an instant, his eyes wide in an emaciated face. He was so pale, a spectre of who she remembered, pallid skin taut over scrawny wrists and hollow cheeks. His hair, which had once been bright red curls, had become matted locks.

  “Peter!”

  Before Peter could reply or Dana could discern anything more, the man pulled her out of view down the corridor and Peter’s signal vanished, blocked off by the dense walls. They reached a flight of stairs and he began to climb. Dana’s legs didn’t have the strength to climb them, and every step made her feel weak and lightheaded. The man didn’t care, and several times Dana slipped forward and crashed her knees painfully against the concrete steps, and the man swore or cursed and yanked her arm hard.

  The stairs ended in a small concrete room filled with stuffy heat, a skylight in the roof and a weathered door in the wall facing the steps. The man opened the door to outside air, and then Dana was out on the roof of the building, where Gamma and the man with the hawk stood, near some chairs and tables and equipment.

  The air was loaded with the sickly smell of putrefaction, and Dana at first thought it must be from the abattoir heap in the courtyard, but as her eyes adjusted to the bright sunlight after the dank corridors she realised there was some enormous thing lying across the surface of the roof, filthy wings of ragged brown feathers extended like a sun-basking bird, a ruff of steel quills surrounding a cruel metal beak protruding from one end. At the other was a tail with a dark tuft on the tip and an expanse of motheaten dun fur, balding in places and with holes in it through which metal bones showed and decomposition fluids oozed. The creature rolled its head to one side to observe her, raised a steel lid over a camera-lens eye, and shifted slightly to reveal a heaving mass of maggots on the damp concrete where it had been lying. Dana swallowed back watery vomit as the man led her past, and shoved a plastic chair into the backs of her knees. “Sit.”

  Where Dana had been positioned, the sun was full in her face, and she had to squint to get any impression of Gamma and the other man. Gamma wasn’t looking at her and seemed to be preoccupied with him. The hawk was shuffling its feet in an agitated manner. It tried to launch itself, but the leather straps around each of its ankles were held firmly in the man’s gauntlet, and the bird pounded the air with its wings, beating the man over the head and straining on its anchor, until it relented and let itself dangle instead, swinging back and forth with its wings half open.

  The man very carefully slid the palm of his free hand under the bird’s enormous breastbone and lifted it back up onto his glove.

  Gamma shouted, “Prendick, what is that you have in your pocket?”

  The burly man slowly withdrew something from his trouser pocket, an air of defeat hanging over him. Gamma took it from his hand― a metal key.

  “We’ve had to tell you about this before. I gave you your Sight. I can just as easily take her away from you again!”

  The eagle spread its wings over the man’s scarred head and screamed in Gamma’s direction, its golden eyes intense. Gamma turned away from it in disdain, and flung the key over the parapet. It disappeared in the glare of the sun over the south-west side of the building.

  “Now pick up that box!”

  The eagle turned its head to focus on a plastic box with a carry handle and airholes on the floor, the sort of box small pets are taken to the vet in. The big man, Prendick or whoever he was, bent down and picked it up with his free hand, as deftly as though he had see it with his own eyes.

  Dana’s breath quickened. That was the signal she had sensed. The bird was connected... to the man. He saw through the eagle’s eyes.

  Why did he have a key, and why had Gamma thrown it away? And if he could see via a connection to the eagle, why had he acted as though he didn’t know she was there when she’d encountered him in the corridor?

  Gamma faced Dana. “You will answer our questions.”

  “Gamma, I’m Epsilon. Don’t you remember?”

  Gamma was unmoved. Her voice remained steady. “Yes, I remember. They all said you weren’t real.”

  Dana stared at the girl’s face, older than she remembered her, sensing for her signal and trying to connect to the person she knew from the dreams. “Well, I am real.” She couldn’t come up with a better way to answer. “My name’s Dana Provine.”

  “Prendick, open the box.”

  Prendick opened the grid at the front of the box and put his hand inside, and when he brought it back out he dragged out what at first looked like a tabby cat with its back arched like it didn’t want to come out, and when it did there was something dreadfully wrong with it. Its
head was covered with coarse dark hair and did not have the triangular ears a cat should, and when Prendick turned it round to stand it on the table it made a hideous croaking sound as though its vocal cords weren’t compatible with its lungs, and she recognized its face as being that of a monkey. A monkey’s head, sewn onto a decapitated cat in place of its own.

  “You will answer our questions.” Gamma repeated. “If you lie, the Sphinx will know, and the Sphinx will suffer on your behalf.”

  The catmonkey looked at Dana as Prendick tied the chain on its collar to the table, and she averted her eyes to look at the bandages on her forearms in shame and pity. It was giving off a signal of utmost misery and dejection. It wanted to die.

  “How did you find this place?” Gamma demanded.

  “I found a wyvern,” Dana answered, not wanting to look at the Sphinx. “I tried to use the information it gave me to find out where it had come from.”

  “I sent the wyvern to search for and bring back those who give out a signal, those who can influence things with their minds. They have something in their blood that can be extracted and used to bind living nerves to computer chips. We found the imbecile boy, and we found a grave of another child.”

  “Alpha’s grave!” Dana’s lightheadedness didn’t lessen the hot outrage at the revelation. Alpha had died as an innocent in the Information Terrorism attack, because of the mistakes Jananin and Ivor, and Dana herself had made in their failure to keep her safe. She had been laid to rest in an unmarked grave, and her rest had been violated on top of what she had suffered in life.

  “You know them?”

  “And Peter’s not an imbecile! He’s just a boy with ADHD!”

  The Sphinx fidgeted on the table. “She’s holding something back,” said the man behind her.