by M T McGuire
Few Are Chosen, K’Barthan Series: Part 1
M T McGuire
Published in 2010 by Hamgee University Press, www.Hamgee.co.uk
Republished in 2014
Copyright © M T McGuire 2010
Silver award winner in the
Wishing Shelf Independent Book Awards 2011
Awarded the Awesome Indies Seal of Approval http://awesomeindies.net/
Awarded The IndiePENdents Seal – ‘Well written, well edited, unknown books’ http://www.indiependents.org
For Sharon Henson and Hamdi al-Menshawy
who had to leave before the party started.
http://www.hamgee.co.uk/freebook1.html
The right of M T McGuire to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Likewise, any events, organisations and products depicted in this book are also imaginary or used fictitiously and any resemblance to their real life counterparts is also entirely coincidental.
Few Are Chosen is written in British English, with some light swearing
Estimated UK film rating of this book: PG (parental guidance)
This edition ISBN:
mobi 978-1-907809-02-9
e-pub: 978-1-907809-02-6
Acknowledgements
Cover design by A Trouble Halved
Thank you to editors Trish Chapman and Mike Rose-Steel
Beta reader Francis Porretto
This version edited by Kate Jackson
Few Are Chosen, K’Barthan Series: Part 1
Meet The Pan of Hamgee: coward, unwilling adventurer and, by some miracle, K’Barth’s longest surviving outlaw. He just wants a quiet life so working as getaway driver is probably a bad career move. Then he falls in love at first sight with a woman he hasn’t even met who comes from an alternative reality. That’s when things really begin to get complicated.
Meet Ruth Cochrane: she’s the Chosen One, destined to play a pivotal role in saving K’Barth from a cruel dictator. She’s never heard of K’Barth, though. She’s a public relations executive from London and she’s totally unaware of the chaos about to hit her life.
Meet Lord Vernon: power hungry psychopath on the brink of world domination. He wants to cement his hold on K’Barth by kidnapping the Chosen One and forcing her to marry him. Only one person is standing in his way: someone who doesn’t even realise it, The Pan of Hamgee. For The Pan, and Ruth, that’s a deadly problem.
Contents
Copyright, dedication and acknowledgements
Start Reading
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
K’Barthan Series:Part 2 excerpt
Afterword
Who is M T McGuire?
A bit about snurds
Other books by M T McGuire
M T Recommends ... similar books by other authors
Author news
Book merchandise
Chapter 1
For the first time in months, The Pan of Hamgee was about to spend a night indoors. Not any old indoors, either; this was a luxury apartment, in a luxury area. The Planes was the swankiest place to live in the entire city: central, near the financial quarter and full of the loaded gentry. Outside, a gale battered the trees and flung hailstones against the windows. Inside, The Pan relaxed a little further into the easy chair and smiled to himself, enjoying the rare sensation of being somewhere pleasant.
“Oh yes. The Hamgeean has finally arrived,” he murmured drowsily. Yeh. Let’s face it, it was about time.
The flat was warm, and as long as he was very, very careful to discharge his caretaking duties correctly, it was his for the duration. All he had to do was live there, keep the place clean and not break anything. The not breaking anything part worried him, but in theory, the rest should be easy. Surely he could cope with that.
He stretched and tipped his hat lower over his face. His eyes felt heavy and, as he let them close, he enjoyed the soft firelight and then, the feeling of drowsiness and warmth as he dozed. Such a luxury: he hadn’t let his guard drop like this in months.
Firelight ... he thought and yawned. He had a small inkling there was something wrong but he was looking forward to his first night in a bed for two months and he was too tired to care.
The flames leapt and crackled, warming his feet, but the worrying feeling continued to nag him. An orange glow flickered across the walls and filled the room with an eerie light.
It was also filling the room with smoke.
“Pants!” shouted The Pan, leaping to his feet.
What had he done?
“No no no no noooo.” All in all, it would have been a lovely fire if it wasn’t for one small technicality. It was in the middle of the carpet.
By The Prophet, this was serious. He was supposed to be looking after the flat not wrecking it!
He stood looking about him, raking his hands through his hair as he tried to think. What had possessed him to leave the candle on the table?
Idiot!
Despite his fear, part of him couldn’t help being fascinated, in a dangerously detached manner, at the speed with which the flames were taking hold. Please don’t let the rug be valuable.
No time to panic, stay calm. Breathe ... good. It was only one carpet. So long as nothing else got damaged, the flat’s owner, Big Merv, would probably spare his life. What to do? Easy, smother the flames. Quickly, he folded the edges of the rug over the top of its burning centre, but he merely succeeded in igniting them, too.
By The Prophet’s hair! What now? He cast about him with mounting panic. The window. He would carry it over there and hurl it out. No wait; it might melt and stick to him, charring his arms to a crisp or, worse, it might stick to the wall and set the whole building ablaze. Burning Big Merv’s carpet was bad enough, torching his entire block was another matter entirely.
Right. The
re was only one thing for it. He would have to sacrifice his supper. Sole and chips would be fine on its own. He could live without the peas.
The Pan scuttled into the kitchen where the peas bubbled merrily away on the stove. It was a pity to waste them – he liked peas – but it was quicker than running a bowl of water, and he could put some more on once he’d put the fire out. The peas were easily replaced. The Pan, on the other hand, was not. However, he had a small chance of surviving another week if he could put out the flames NOW before they did any more damage.
He had already learned how well Big Merv’s pans conducted heat, even the parts which weren’t supposed to, so he put on the oven glove, grabbed the handle and went back into the sitting room. It was even smokier in there now. His eyes stung and he coughed as he blundered through the acrid fumes towards the fierce glow of the fire.
He tried to hold his breath and think of the moment when he’d doused the blaze with the water from the peas and the danger was past. He held the pan out and poured the contents deliberately onto the centre of the flames.
There was a sound. A loud sound. “Whump!”
Ah. That was wrong. A gust of boiling air lifted him bodily from the floor and hurled him into the kitchen.
Very wrong. He looked at the pan in his hand. He’d used the chips. How could he be such a monumental cretin?
Trying not to cry, he shut the door and put on the extractor fan. There was nothing he could do about the sitting room now. It was better to keep the flames in there, stay where he was and try to save the rest of the flat. Which reminded him: he called the fire brigade. As he explained his predicament, another worrying thought occurred to him. He’d set fire to the carpet and then, instead of putting it out, he’d poured a couple of pints of boiling cooking oil over it. Big Merv was bound to think it he’d done it on purpose; nobody normal could be that stupid.
The Pan realised his future wasn’t looking bleak, so much as short. Big Merv would kill him, horribly, most likely. He didn’t want to die young, especially now, when he’d almost got it together.
Oh well. Back to life on the run.
“Trust me to screw it up,” he said aloud.
Such a simple, straightforward assignment, and he had blundered on day one. He glanced at his watch. Where was the fire brigade, for Arnold’s sake? His nerves couldn’t stand waiting around for much longer. He had to be gone before Big Merv arrived.
He glanced out of the window. No sign yet.
“Come on ...”
How could one stupid wisecrack to a Grongolian police officer have brought him to this? How he wished he’d kept his giant gob closed. He’d be back in Hamgee or at university by now and his family – well, OK, he would probably never have managed to patch things up with his dad – his family would have been dysfunctional at best but at least he would have had one.
He’d messed it up again, but wallowing in self-pity wasn’t going to help. Being sacked from Big Merv’s organisation was terminal. The fire brigade would have to sort this out alone. He grabbed his hat and hurriedly put on his cloak. It was time to run away. He noticed that the grill was still on and without really thinking what he was doing, checked the sole.
“Done to perfection,” he told himself and then put on his best mumsy voice. “This is the last meal you’ll have for a few days so you’d better eat it.” He called this self-parenting. In the absence of any real parents, he sometimes tried to imagine what they might have said, and say it for them. The accent didn’t sound remotely like his mother but it made her imagined utterances that bit more believable.
“Yes,” he agreed with himself – he did a much better impression of his father. “You’ll need all the energy you can get.”
He couldn’t normally afford to eat a luxury item like sole, but he’d wanted to cook something healthy that morning so he’d got up very early in order to steal it fresh from the fish market.
“Yeh. It would be a pity to waste this after going to all that time and effort. I had to run for ages before that fishmonger gave up the chase.”
Another sigh. He was too old to do this any more. Children had imaginary friends although, as an orphan, he supposed an imaginary family wasn’t so strange.
“Except that you’re nearly twenty-one now, a little old for imaginary anything, aren’t you?”
Yes. Of course he was. Never mind. This was wasting time.
He scooped the fish onto a plate, drained the peas, turned off the stove and, glancing out at the driving rain, placed a second plate over the top of it. It would be a shame if it got waterlogged. A quick rummage in Big Merv’s fridge and he found a plastic squeezy lemon. He would have preferred a real one but it would do. He stole it, along with a knife and fork, and grabbed his keys. Pausing by the mirrored oven door to give his reflection the bird – what a brain-dead twerk – he ran into the hall, plates in hand.
The fire brigade would turn up before long and so would Big Merv. They could take care of everything. If he played his cards right he would be on the other side of the world by that time, living under an assumed name. He left the door on the latch, so the fire brigade could get in if they arrived first, and ran outside.
A crowd was gathering.
“Not good,” he muttered.
He ducked behind a parked burger van which was setting up, like some evil-smelling vulture in reverse, to churn out food for the spectators, and ran across the road through the sheeting rain. He had gone a couple of hundred yards before he dared turn round. One of the windows of the flat blew out. Flames poured into the night air, licking hungrily at the side of the building and the dry wooden sills of the windows on the floor above.
“Please no. Please not the whole block.” He raked his free hand through his hair.
The Pan didn’t make a habit of retrospection. Dwelling on the past didn’t change anything, and he had enough to regret without continually reminding himself of each and every single thing he’d stuffed up. He turned his back on the carnage and walked away, into an uncertain future.
Chapter 2
Not far away, in the cellar of the Parrot and Screwdriver, an esteemed local hostelry which also happened to be The Pan of Hamgee’s local, dark things were afoot. This was mainly because, despite the fact the cellar was thoroughly insulated to hide their current nefarious activity, the first of the pub’s landladies, Gladys Parker, wouldn’t let the second, Ada Maddox, turn on the lights.
“My eyes isn’t what they was. If it ain’t dark I won’t see proper.”
Every now and again there was a loud thump against the door and a harsh avian voice shouted, “Arse!”
Ada’s pet parrot, Humbert, had belonged to her uncle. He was a sailor and Humbert swore like one. Such a delicate experiment was no place for a domestic pet, especially not one of Humbert’s disposition. However, the reason for his exclusion was a complicated concept for a parrot to grasp, especially a parrot like Humbert when he didn’t want to be where Ada wasn’t.
In the dim gleam of a guttering candle the two old ladies were setting up something that looked like a gyroscope, only not. It was cobbled together from bits of a fully functioning original (which had met with an accident), a Biro, an old saucer and some of the red elastic bands the postman always left on the step.
“Are you sure this will work, dear?” asked Ada, her voice full of concern.
“Yer. Trev went down the Business Side and found some longer elastic bands.” Ada wore a blank expression. “’S bigger parcels in business and more post,” Gladys explained. “It’ll wind longer, so’s it’ll get up more speed and run longer.” She was busy with a small wooden propeller that had a hook in it, twisting it round and round. One end of the larger elastic band under discussion was attached to the hook; the other was attached to the central spindle of the wobbly home-made contraption. As Gladys wound the elastic band, Ada held the machine steady with one hand, while in her other hand was a tuning fork.
Finally, Gladys stopped twisting the elastic band
.
“Are you ready, dear?” Ada asked.
“Yer. What’s yer note?”
“G.”
Gladys sniffed. “Should be an A.”
“I know dear, but there’s only one note’s difference. I’m sure I can find an A.”
“I hopes so. Does you have the jar?”
Ada checked that the jar of Gladys’ home-made chutney was within reach, towards the edge of the only clear surface available for them to set up their apparatus; the lid of the freezer.
“I do.”
A curt nod. “Hmph. You knows what’ll happen to the chutney if we done it.”
“Yes dear,” said Ada, who was aware, or at least partly aware of what would happen to the chutney – partly, but not wholly – on the grounds that while she knew the chutney would disappear, neither she nor Gladys had a clue where it would actually go.
“I is going to count three.”
“Right-ho, dear.”
“THREE!” shouted Gladys, letting go of the propeller. Everything happened very quickly. By some miracle of science, the wobbly gyroscope began to spin with remarkable stability. Dim bolts of electrical charge flickered between the machine and the chutney jar. They gave off a green glow, while the machine itself hummed; a low bass hum. Ada bashed the tuning fork on the table, put it to her ear and sang:
“Laaaaa!”
Gladys grabbed a thing which looked a little like an upholstery needle and stuck it into the green flecks; moving it towards the jar. The note emanating from the machine changed. As the elastic band wound down, there was just time for the green flecks to turn blue before it ceased to spin.
The old ladies waited in silence. The chutney stayed where it was.
“Oh dear! I was so sure we had it that time,” said Ada. Gladys and Ada had been paying regular visits to the cellar to work on their project for some time. They planned to make contraband equipment with which they could establish an escape programme for the blacklisted; a ticket to a new identity and a new life. A one-way ticket, of course, because they couldn’t come back, but then, why would they want to? Where they were going, there was no blacklist and nobody was vermin. OK so some of them weren’t exactly going to blend in, but there were other ex-K’Barthan residents waiting for them, ready to help. The original scheme had gone swimmingly for two years, until Ada had dropped a vital piece of equipment and Gladys’ son Trev had trodden on it. With the last few years’ purges, and the establishment by the government of a New Moral Order, the need for this sorely missed social service was more urgent than ever. The old ladies sought to re-establish it fast, without being discovered by the wrong people; the state or the Resistance, for instance.
