The Dark Divide

by Jennifer Fallon

  ‘This isn’t the paparazzi,’ the captain said. ‘It’s your brother. So go out there and talk to him. He needs to be gone before the crime scene people get here.’

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ Pete promised, and with one last glance at the curious old woman laid out like an ancient Celtic warrior, he turned and stepped out into the softly falling rain, wondering who she really was, why she would want to be laid out like that, and what the hell Logan wanted now.

  CHAPTER 55

  ‘My real name is Ingrid,’ Wakiko told Ren and Trása, as she ceremoniously poured their tea. She was kneeling in front of a low honzen table she had arranged for some of the Empresses’ servants to bring in. The tea ceremony, she had assured them in a whisper when she sent for the paraphernalia to serve them, was a polite and thoughtful act for an honoured guest. It provided her with a perfectly legitimate excuse to be here talking to them, should anybody — Ren assumed she was talking of the Tanabe — choose to question her about why she was fraternising with the Matrarchaí envoy. ‘At least, that was my name once. I hardly remember that girl now. But like you, I am not from this realm.’

  ‘You’re from a magical realm though,’ Trása said. ‘Aren’t you?’

  Wakiko nodded, as she carefully laid out the charcoal fire she would use to heat the water for their tea. Ren had sat through a Japanese tea ceremony before, and knew it would take some time, and that it would be considered the height of bad manners to interrupt the ceremony. Wakiko, or Ingrid, or whatever her name might be, was a lot cannier than when she stood behind her daughters in public and appeared to grant their every whim.

  ‘My realm is quite different to this. In my reality, there were no Undivided and the Faerie kept to themselves.’

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ Ren asked, as Wakiko began to cleanse each of the tea bowls, her whisk, and the delicate ivory tea scoop in a precise order that only she knew, using prescribed motions that had probably been passed down from generation to generation for a thousand years or more. He wasn’t a fan of Japanese tea, or the laborious and complex ceremony that went with serving it, but it was buying them time and gave Wakiko something to focus on, so she didn’t have to look them in the eye.

  ‘When I was sixteen, I was recruited by the Matrarchaí.’

  ‘Recruited for what?’ Ren asked, as Wakiko began to spoon the powdered tea from the caddy into the tea bowl.

  ‘To travel to exotic realms,’ she said, with a faintly reminiscent smile. She poured the water into the bowl and picked up the tea whisk. ‘The adventure of being a rift runner was irresistible to a sixteen-year-old farm girl from Normandy.’ She looked at Trása, adding, ‘As I am sure you will agree.’

  ‘In my realm, the Matrarchaí are midwives,’ Trása said, clearly suspicious of Wakiko and her tea ceremony. ‘Not rift runners.’

  ‘They are both, little Faerie,’ Wakiko told her. ‘In your realm and mine. Their influence is felt across countless realms, both magical and mundane. Trust me, if you know of the Matrarchaí, you are dealing with the same organisation that recruited me and brought me to this realm.’

  ‘To do what?’ Ren asked again, accepting a bowl of thin tea with a bow. He took a sip and forced himself not to grimace. ‘Roam through as many realities as they can find, delivering babies?’

  Wakiko smiled wanly and offered Trása a bowl, before carefully placing the lid on the tea caddy. ‘You would be horrified to learn how close to the truth that is, Renkavana.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Trása said, glancing at Ren with a look that seemed to imply she thought Wakiko a complete loon. Ren wasn’t sure he disagreed with that assessment.

  ‘They are not just delivering babies,’ Wakiko said. ‘They are delivering very specific babies.’

  She paused, waiting for either Ren or Trása to get what she was telling them.

  ‘The psychic twins who become Undivided,’ Ren said, after a moment, a little alarmed by the implications of that statement. ‘They know how to find them.’

  ‘They are not finding them, Renkavana. They are breeding their own.’

  Trása gasped.

  ‘And therein lies the Matrarchaí’s biggest problem,’ Wakiko continued. ‘Humans have no inherent capacity to wield magic. Not a drop of it. To wield the magic of their hated enemy, to produce the twins they require, they must become the enemy.’

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ Trása said, which saved Ren from having to admit the same thing. He put his tea bowl down and sat back on his heels, trying to decide if Wakiko was the answer to all their problems or the start of a whole new raft of them.

  ‘If you are human and you can wield Faerie magic, then you have Faerie blood in you,’ Wakiko said flatly. ‘It is as simple as that.’

  ‘So Chishihero was right? My brother and I are part-Faerie?’ Ren asked, not sure how he felt about such a revelation.

  She nodded, topping up Ren’s cup of tea. ‘Almost pure sídhe, I’d say, to be as powerful as you are.’

  ‘I don’t feel powerful.’

  ‘That’s because you are ignorant of your full potential. Chishihero is not, which is why, when she first met you, she tried to kill you.’

  ‘Rónán can’t be sídhe, or Youkai or any other Faerie race,’ Trása said. ‘Look at him! He looks so human it hurts. And he’s been living in a realm without magic. If he was sídhe that fact alone would have killed him the same way the Matrarchaí killed the Youkai on this world.’

  ‘I said almost pure,’ Wakiko said. ‘That’s the other thing the Matrarchaí breed for — sídhe who can operate in worlds without magic.’

  ‘What’s the point of that?’ Ren asked, thinking there wasn’t much point in being able to wield magic if there was none to wield.

  ‘They can tap into the Enchanted Sphere,’ Wakiko said.

  ‘The what?’ Ren and Trása asked in unison.

  ‘The Enchanted Sphere,’ Wakiko explained impatiently. She was interested in what they could do for her and obviously resented the time taken from that to explain something she clearly thought they ought to know. ‘There is always some magic left, even on depleted worlds,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty thin, but what is left tends to rise and concentrates in a band around the depleted world, which can be accessed if you can reach it.’

  ‘How high up are we talking?’

  Wakiko shrugged. ‘I cannot say, Renkavana. I have only ever been to one world like that, on my way here. The stone circle was located at the top of a building — a building so tall I could never, in my whole life, have imagined mortal man could create such a thing.’

  ‘You could get higher climbing a mountain, I would have thought,’ Ren said, wondering why you would put such a thing as a stone circle in a building. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to tap into the magic from there?’ He was already thinking ahead to when he found his way back to his old realm; to when he finally found Darragh and brought him home. If there was an Enchanted Sphere like that in his reality, then he might have stumbled on the way home for both of them.

  ‘I made the same observation,’ Wakiko said. ‘Lady Delphine told me she needed the concentration of mundane life to allow her to tap into the Enchanted Sphere, which made buildings in cities better than isolated locations higher up, where there wasn’t as much life.’

  ‘There’s hardly any magical life force in a mundane human,’ Trása scoffed. ‘You’d need … I don’t know … millions of people for them to be of any use.’

  ‘In the realm I come from, you only build skyscrapers in cities with millions of people in them,’ Ren pointed out.

  Wakiko smiled. ‘Skyscrapers? Is that what you call them?’

  He nodded.

  ‘It is a fitting word.’

  ‘So Rónán is sídhe with enough human in him to survive outside the Enchanted Sphere,’ Trása said. ‘Like me.’

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘And how did he get that way?’

  Wakiko carefully placed the utensils from her tea
ceremony on the honzen and sat back on her heels again. ‘If one is born of mixed blood, be it any race on Earth, in any reality, human or fey, one will manifest different characteristics of each race. If a dark-skinned man and a light-skinned woman have two children, one might be light-skinned and the other dark, but they would still be brothers.’

  ‘They breed for twins who don’t look like Faerie,’ Ren said, perhaps grasping what she meant a little faster than Trása. He understood the principles of genetic engineering, even if it seemed ludicrous to be using the words ‘genetic engineering’ and ‘Faerie’ in the same sentence. ‘I take it the Faerie have no idea?’

  ‘None at all,’ Wakiko said, shaking her head. ‘The Matrarchaí are relentless in their determination to keep the true nature of the psychic twins a secret.’

  Trása was listening to Wakiko thoughtfully, but at that, she shook her head. ‘It’s not possible,’ she insisted. ‘Even if I believe what you say about breeding for human characteristics, rather than sídhe features, such a plan would never work. The sídhe are long-lived. You don’t think somebody would notice when the Undivided don’t grow old?’

  ‘I do not know the history of your world, little Faerie, but I’d wager one of my limbs that all of your Undivided have died from accident or injury, rather than old age or illness.’

  ‘That’s not …’ Trása hesitated and then frowned. ‘Actually, it is true. I can’t remember the name of any Undivided who lived to a ripe old age.’

  ‘They have to kill them before they live long enough for people to notice they’re not ageing,’ Ren said, a little stunned by what Wakiko was telling them.

  She nodded. ‘Had you stayed in your world as the Undivided, you may have lived until your mid-thirties. Then you would have been killed in such a way that everyone would lament your passing and the tragic manner of your death, and the new Undivided would take over, gaining the Matrarchaí another ten or fifteen years without close scrutiny.’

  ‘How does that work?’ Ren asked, intrigued in spite of himself. ‘Neither of the previous Undivided was our father. How can they have been breeding toward a Faerie Undivided who doesn’t look the part?’

  ‘There is more than one bloodline, Renkavana, and they cross realities at times. The Matrarchaí have been at this for a very long time.’

  ‘But why?’ Trása asked. ‘It can’t just be to have access to sídhe magic. They have that anyway, through the Treaty of Tír Na nÓg.’

  ‘In your world, they might,’ she replied. ‘But there are other worlds where the magic is not shared anywhere near so willingly. That is why they need to achieve Partition.’

  Trása let out an exasperated sigh. She wasn’t buying a word of this, Ren thought.

  ‘Seriously? The Partitionists? That’s your reason for all this cross-reality breeding and subterfuge?’ She turned to Ren. ‘Don’t you listen to this, Rónán. She’s talking nonsense.’

  Wakiko did not seem bothered by Trása’s scepticism. ‘The Partition the Matrarchaí is working toward is not a political movement. It is, so I am led to believe by those with magical abilities, more a state of being.’

  ‘So the Matrarchaí are jumping across realities, breeding babies and murdering people like me for a bit of a buzz?’

  Wakiko looked at Ren and sighed. ‘You poor boy, you have no idea how this affects you, do you?’

  ‘I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘You and your twin are sídhe, Renkavana, or Youkai or Faerie or whatever else you want to call it. You are bound to them. You may not realise it, but you will do whatever it takes to protect them.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘It’s what you are,’ Wakiko said with a shrug. ‘If you don’t believe me, try killing your Beansídhe companion and see how far you get.’

  ‘Be assured, my lady,’ Ren said with feeling, glancing at Trása who responded by pulling a face at him, ‘I’ve been tempted on more than one occasion.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Wakiko said. ‘You cannot do it. And that is the flaw in the Matrarchaí plan to steal the magic on their worlds. The vessels they breed to take it for them, are by their very nature, compelled to protect their enemy, and not humanity.’

  ‘But if you achieve Partition, you can cut the ties?’ Trása asked, looking thoughtful. She was starting to get it, Ren thought, and she didn’t look happy about what this Norman geisha was telling her. ‘You’d have Faerie prepared to kill Faerie.’

  ‘That’s where I come in,’ Wakiko said, nodding. ‘And others like me. I am human, you see. Not a drop of Faerie blood do I own, as far back as you care to go. I was recruited by the Matrarchaí to bear a set of Undivided twins.’

  ‘Because you’re human?’ Ren asked. ‘But if your logic is right, they’d need you to be sídhe.’

  Wakiko shrugged. ‘I do not know how it works, Renkavana, only that it does. If you breed the Undivided to the point where, like you, they look human but are almost pure Faerie, and then breed those twins again with a pure human, you get Empress, or Emperor, twins — twins powerful enough to channel the magic, but not compelled to protect the Faerie races.’

  ‘So then you’re free to mass-murder my people,’ Trása said, her ire rising, ‘without the inconvenient need to protect your own kind getting in the way.’

  ‘That, I fear, is exactly right,’ Wakiko agreed.

  ‘And that’s what your daughters are?’ Ren asked, putting a hand on Trása’s thigh to calm her down. Somewhat to his surprise, she didn’t bat it away, but placed her hand over his, as if seeking comfort from the contact.

  Wakiko nodded. ‘Had I known what was in store for my children, I would never have agreed,’ she said. ‘But I was young and naïve and enchanted by the idea of magic and my mission to seduce myself a prince.’ She took a deep breath that seemed filled with regret. ‘I had visions of being a queen. Instead, I find myself the nursemaid to a couple of demons.’

  ‘They seem a bit spoiled,’ Ren said, thinking she was a little harsh. ‘My shrink would call it an over-developed sense of entitlement.’ He smiled at her, not sure what else he could do for her. ‘I’m sure they’ll grow out of it.’

  Wakiko shook her head. ‘They have shared the Comhroinn but have not been allowed to fully access it yet. Once they are given access to that knowledge, they will not be my little girls any longer. They will be the heartless tools of the Matrarchaí.’

  It was all a bit much to take in, and Ren wasn’t sure what Wakiko expected him and Trása to do about it. ‘Why are you telling us this?’

  Wakiko glanced toward the entrance before she answered. ‘Because Chishihero has received word from Nara that the real envoy from the Matrarchaí is coming here,’ she said. Then she smiled. ‘Oh, don’t try to look surprised. I knew the moment I met you that you had nothing to do with the Matrarchaí.’

  ‘Why didn’t you betray us?’ Ren asked.

  ‘Because I need your help,’ she said. ‘When Lady Delphine gets here with the real messenger, she will unlock the Comhroinn and my daughters will transform from spoiled children into the monsters they are destined to become.’

  ‘I’m more worried why Chishihero has said nothing,’ Trása said, frowning, which made Wakiko scowl. She was a mother worried for her children and obviously considered it the only problem worth discussing. ‘She has no love for me, and I’m pretty sure she has even less time for you, Rónán. I would have thought she’d jump at the chance to expose you as a fraud.’

  ‘She will be planning to,’ Wakiko agreed, lowering her voice. ‘My feeling is Chishihero wants to wait until she has proof and someone powerful enough to take you down when she reveals you are not the real envoy.’

  ‘The proof being the real envoy,’ Trása said. She turned to Ren. ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Wait until the rift opens and get the hell outta Dodge.’

  Trása let out an exasperated sigh. ‘That means nothing to me.’

  ‘I mean we leave. As s
oon as the rift opens.’

  ‘You can’t,’ Wakiko said. ‘Delphine will be there. She will not permit it.’

  ‘What do we do then?’

  ‘It is simple, Renkavana,’ Wakiko said. ‘You must kill Delphine and anybody who comes through the rift with her.’

  Oh, Ren thought sourly. Is that all? ‘That will close the rift and we’re stuck here.’ Not to mention the whole killing someone in cold blood thing …

  Wakiko shook her head. ‘The last remaining book of ori mahou is under lock and key in the Imperial Palace in Nara, along with the location of the few gampi trees left, from which the paper must be made to open a rift between realms.’ She took a deep breath and looked both of them squarely in the eye. ‘If you save my daughters from Delphine, I will see you get access to everything you need in order to open a rift back to your own reality.’

  ‘But we have to kill someone,’ Ren said, to be certain he understood exactly what sort of deal she was putting on the table.

  ‘You have to save my daughters, Renkavana.’ She shrugged and began to pack up her tea service. ‘It may involve killing Delphine and her envoy, or it may not. I have no feeling on the matter one way or another. I just need her to leave this realm and never come back. You are Youkai. You are one of the Undivided. You are far more powerful, magically, than she is, I suspect. If you do this thing, I will help you get home. I can offer you no fairer deal than that.’

  Ren glanced at Trása who nodded slowly. ‘I’m in if you are. And the lesser Youkai will follow if I ask them to.’

  He turned to Wakiko, for the first time in his life feeling like Darragh must have when he’d ruled their realm. The unsettled boy who was Ren Kavanagh — indulged son of a rich and famous movie star — seemed to be fading into the distance. He was Rónán, one half of the Undivided, facing a life and death decision he was expected to resolve.

  ‘How long have we got until they get here?’ he asked. ‘We have some plans to make.’