“Yes, quite,” Folkestone said.
“Sure,” Hand muttered morosely.
“However, I can tell you, quite confidentially of course,” she said, leaning forward a bit and her voice dropping almost to a whisper, “that Her Majesty…”
“God save her,” Hand murmured.
“…that Her Majesty is inclined find interplanetary bogies a bit more believable than a demented mastermind out to conquer the Solar System,” she said. “She said such foolishness happens only in shilling shockers and…”
“She is not amused,” Folkestone quipped.
Hand cast the Captain a stormy and disapproving frown.
“A little respect, Captain Folkestone,” Lady Cynthia said frostily.
“My apologies, of course.”
“I was about to say, I tend to agree with Her Majesty, no matter the prevailing opinion at the Admiralty or Whitehall.” She pushed several copies toward the two men. “Regardless of the truth at the heart of this enigma, the danger to the Empire is very real, even though some contend the danger is past with the destruction of the Constantinople headquarters, the suppression of other cult centres, and the apparent end of the dream-spice importation.”
“Slaughter was of a mind that Daraph-Kor will not quit just because of this setback,” Folkestone pointed out. “Thus, we must stop him from attaining the City of the Maze.”
“But, Captain, I told you…”
“Yes, the City of the Maze,” Lady Cynthia said sharply, and Hand’s neck seemed to crack as he whipped his attention to her as she too mentioned the phrase. “If you would, please examine the papers before you.”
The photographic copies were notes and journals obviously confiscated from scenes of destruction. The fidelity of the plates had preserved rips in the originals, smears of dirt and blood, and burnt edges. There were some written entries, disjointed phrases in the languages of three worlds, but most notes were graphic in nature, scrawls and sketches that tried to record the evidence of things never seen by living eye in this mortal realm.
Hand gasped and sat back hard in his chair. His chest felt constricted, his throat tight. A sense of morbid familiarity flooded his mind. He focussed on the steady metronome of his clockwork heart, willing himself to stay connected to this world.
“Sergeant!”
It seemed to Hand that he spiralled down in the images on the pages before him. Down the long corridors of maybe times he hurtled, through flames and ice, wreathed about by billowing smoke of destruction and death. That dread night of pain and loss rushed back to engulf him. He had recalled much of what he had seen while in the grip of dream-spice, but now he realised he had suppressed much more than he remembered. Terror flashed through him like the eviscerating cuts of a wicked pyrang. He felt lost, doomed to fall forever…until he seemed to see a pair of bright limpid eyes filled with love and hope, and he thought he heard his name murmured.
“Aythaneshia…” he whispered.
“Sergeant Hand!”
The mists cleared from Hand’s mind and he realised his arms were pinned to his side by Folkestone, that his shoulders were pushed back against his chair by the surprising strength of Lady Cynthia. Abruptly he stopped struggling,
“I am sorry, I am all right now,” he assured them.
They let go of him, paused, then moved back to their own chairs when it seemed the moment had indeed passed. He leaned forward and studied the copies, ignoring their concerned glances.
“It’s these here sketches and such,” Hand finally said. “They were made while the people were directly under the influence of dream-spice…or during flashbacks.”
“Are you sure you are…” Folkestone started to ask.
“Quite fine, sir,” Hand assured them. “These drawings made me remember things I did not know I had forgot. Visions, I suppose you would call them, impressions of a place…” He peered at the written fragments closely. “Lady Cynthia, you are much better at all the different lingoes than I am, but that says something like ‘house of forking paths,’ don’t it?”
“Yes, in Low Martian,” she confirmed. “The other entries are equally enigmatic, but make references to crossroads, labyrinths, double axes, and myriad doorways. Everything seems to be filtered through the cultural experience of the individual, but they all point to the idea they were dreaming or envisioning a single place. According to our best analysts, once you get past the allusions you end up with…”
“The City of the Maze,” Hand said, nodded. “I saw it.”
“Hand, steady now,” Folkestone cautioned.
Hand blinked, took a deep breath and forced a smile.
“Sergeant Hand is fine, Robert,” Lady Cynthia said. “He is made of stern stuff.”
Hand gave her a brief appreciative nod. “Yes, m’lady, it takes more than having my brain turned inside out to do me in.”
“Good man!” Folkestone encouraged. “Dash it, Sergeant, a few minutes ago you were telling me this City of the Maze was no more real than fairyland or Fiddler’s Green. Now, it is real, and you have seen it?”
“When I was in the grip of the dream-spice, I felt as if I were not alone,” Hand said. “At the time I could not explain it, so I guess my mind somehow pushed it out of my awareness, along with some of the visions.”
“Perfectly understandable,” interjected Lady Cynthia. “It is well known that accident victims often do not recall the accident after the fact, that soldiers sometimes do not remember the battle in which they are severely injured. Trauma is injurious to both mind and body, but whereas the physical being enters a state of shock to dull the pain, the mind induces amnesia. A sudden shock, and the memory returns.”
“I remember…” Hand murmured. “I remember now. I was not alone. Probably because the dose I was given was so massive, I spanned the worlds and joined those in thrall to Daraph-Kor, but I was not one of them, not trying to break down the barriers.”
“I wish you would make sense, Sergeant,” Folkestone said.
“I am sorry, sir, but it really isn’t something easily explained to someone not involved,” Hand said. “Dreams are hard enough to recall upon waking, but this is like trying to remember a dream you had five years ago after you woke up under a pub table…I guess, though, I really am making a royal quaddle of this.”
“Try your best,” Lady Cynthia urged.
“That’s all right, Sergeant,” Folkestone assured him. “I’d not likely be any more coherent with my brains scrambled.”
“Just tell us what you recall of the City of the Maze,” Lady Cynthia said. “If that is Daraph-Kor’s destination, where he plans to begin again, we must know everything we can.”
“It is unlikely Daraph-Kor and Black Ray will ever make it to Mars,” Folkestone pointed out rather smugly. “Even if they make it past all the hunters in the aether, they will run afoul of the Royal Navy and the Martian Defence Force. We will catch up with him, no doubt, in time to see their bodies float out the shattered hull of their aethership.”
Hand nodded, vaguely hopeful.
“Your confidence always verges on arrogance,” she pointed out sharply. “Sometimes you are as exasperating as all the other gilded arses at Whitehall and the Admiralty!”
“Lady Cynthia!” Sergeant Hand gasped, thoroughly shocked even though, as a soldier, he had of course heard much worse in all the languages of the Solar System.
Captain Folkestone smirked.
“I do beg your pardon, Sergeant,” she said, blushing, “but Captain Folkestone can be very infuriating at times.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hand said with a knowing nod.
Folkestone glanced at the Martian.
“At times,” Hand amended softly.
Lady Cynthia struggled to regain the decorum that had fled at her outburst. “Sergeant, if you please – City of the Maze.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed. “As I explained to the Captain, it has always just been an obscure provincial term for an imaginary place. In the year
s I lived in the Martian highlands, before joining the army and changing my name, I don’t suppose I heard it said more than two or three times, all by old people. No one ever gave any thought to it being an actual place…but it is.” He gestured to the copies of dreams imperfectly rendered. “These people saw it, or some aspect of it that they could understand through the lens of their own experiences, their own hopes and fears…I cannot speak to what the City of the Maze was to them, but I can tell you what I sensed of it…now I can. I saw the City of the Maze on the shore of a purple sea. Ships like great birds sailed upon the sea…”
“But…” Folkestone started to protest, but fell silent when Lady Cynthia touched his wrist, lingering a moment.
“The sea-kings were not the Martians we describe in the old stories, not Martians at all, I know that now, least not as they are now, nothing like any of the races,” Hand continued. “This Elder Race ruled Mars in savage splendour, masters of magic and science, benign governors of the less advanced races, the beings who would later become the highland and lowland tribes, and all the others. They built many cities in their time, but the greatest was the City of the Maze, the centre of their scientific and magical researches. There they opened the way for the Dark Gods to enter our realm. The Elder Race was destroyed by its own blind ambitions, by that which in their arrogance they called from the darkness.
“War broke out, but the Elder Race never stood a chance of winning, not against an enemy that throve on fear and could reach right into living brains. The Elder Race retreated to the City of the Maze, where their history ended and ours began. The bloody age of the Dark Gods started, with modern Martians now their servitors, and their food. So it went, until after long aeons, something stirred in the City of the Maze, the Elder Race returning to wage one final battle against their ancient enemy. They could not kill, not even the Dark Gods, for it was not in their nature to do so, but they could banish them. Not return them to their original realm, but to a dimension from which they could not break loose. After battles that almost shattered the planets of the Solar System, the Elder Race was successful, locking the Dark Gods in the inter-dimensional tunnels that served as their way of walking between the worlds. Defeated and confined, but at great cost. The Elder Race, seeing what the rule of the Dark Gods had done to Mars and its people, built the canals, then went away, leaving Mars to its new masters.”
“And eventually the Elder Race passed into myth, then were forgotten entirely,” Folkestone mused.
Hand uttered a soft, sad sigh. “We got everything mixed up.”
“Felix…” Lady Cynthia murmured, her compassion for a long-time friend overpowering society’s strictures about class, not that they had such a death-grip on her anyway.
“Oh, I’m all right,” he assured them in a voice tinged with poignancy. “You both know I was never one for clinging to the dead past. Still, while I never believed the old stories were true, I never thought they were false. Now, in a flash, I know the truth, that we made some other history our own, that the old heroes and sea-kings weren’t even Martians, not like us, that we are not much different that a colony of sand-beetles inhabiting a found trash-heap and ignorantly thinking it our own.”
They both started to comfort him, but he waved them off.
“Wormwood,” he said. “Yeah, that’s what it is. But the past is past, and deader now than I even thought before, so there you are. I know plenty who devoutly believe in gods and sea-kings and even visitors from Earth, but they ain’t ever going to hear anything different from me. All some of them got is faith, and I’m hot going to take that away.”
“Good show, Sergeant,” Lady Cynthia said.
“Yes,” Folkestone agreed, “but we have much more important things to worry about than busted myths.”
“Do you know where this City of the Maze is?”
Hand shook his head, weary after the shattering revelation of his own people’s tragic and misunderstood inheritance. He put his hands to his face. Knowledge and enlightenment were not always what they were cracked up to be, he reflected ruefully. Wormwood indeed. He dropped his hands to his sides, leaned back, and sighed.
“The seas of old are gone,” Hand said. “Nothing now marks the place where the City of the Maze stood, but…”
“But what?” Lady Cynthia prompted. “If there is anything you can recall from the vision…”
“Yes,” Folkestone said. “The smallest clue may be of help.”
“I remember stone wharves, a jumble of blocks and rows of arching stones like the ribs of some massive…” His voice trailed into a pensive silence.
Folkestone and Lady Cynthia looked at him expectantly, but held their silence, as if fearful an intrusion might make a tenuous memory slip away.
After a few moments he said: “I don’t know the lowlands or the deserts near as well as I know the highlands, but it seems…there was something a few years back about a German expedition into the Tharsis Erg below the volcanic plateau…came to sorrow…some kind of disaster…”
He looked to his companions for help.
“I remember something about Huns coming to woe in one of the deserts, but it’s vague…” Folkestone said.
Lady Cynthia tapped her palm against the table triumphantly and smiled. “I know just the one, the Schliemann Expedition, funded by the Berlin Museum. It was rather a big noise at the time, Germany losing the discoverer of Atlantis and him entering an off-limits area without proper permits from our government or the Martian authorities. At the time, Sergeant, if I am not mistaken, I believe you were still in hospital…”
“And I was on Earth,” Folkestone added. “That incident in Antarctica. By the time I got back to London, it had all died down, not that the papers gave it much ink to begin with.”
“It was certainly played for all it was worth in the Syrtis Major Times and the Mars Daily Mail,” Lady Cynthia recounted. “It nearly rose to the point of very harsh words between the three governments. Had you not been in hospital getting your brasswork unbent, or some such thing, and you traipsing around that lunatic mountain range in the antipodes, I am sure we could have counted on at least a minor war.”
Folkestone rolled his eyes. “What about that erg, Hand?”
“There are rock formations there resembling what I saw in my vision, like enormous defleshed ribs,” Hand pointed out. “And the reason the area is off-limits is because there are so many sacred ruins…none old enough to be part of the sea-king era, far as we know, but fossils show the sea once lapped right up to the plateau.”
“What the deuce does Schliemann have to do with it?” Folkestone demanded. “If I remember correctly, he was something of a charlatan was he not? Trying to tie his Atlantis discoveries in with the Trojan War?”
“Well, the Germans thought very highly of him,” Lady Cynthia pointed out. “What is important to us are the rumours that came out when the sole survivor died. In his delirium, he raved about monsters, about gargantuan octopi and other creatures that came out of the darkness at them. It was all played rather low key, as the Germans wanted no embarrassment to attend the tragic loss of their national hero, and Her Majesty’s Government wanted no lurid headlines…quite unseemly, you know.”
“Quite,” Folkestone agreed.
“One of the nursing sisters read to me.” Hand grinned. “And not from the Times or the Daily Mail.”
“Probably from those tattle sheets you like so much, I would wager,” Folkestone smirked. “The Weekly Worlds News and such.”
“Passes the time, sir, and the sister got some well-deserved giggles,” Hand said. “Monsters…tentacles…ghosts of Mars. So what if it’s mostly bilge water? People like that sort of thing.”
“A waste of paper,” Folkestone grumbled.
“If that expedition stumbled across the City of the Maze, it may all be true,” Lady Cynthia said. “We should head directly for the Tharsis Erg.”
“That ship will be destroyed before it ever gets near Mars,” Folkestone said
confidently. “Or it will be intercepted in the atmosphere.” He frowned and chewed his lip thoughtfully. “On the other hand, it would not hurt to change course if they are indeed set on going there.”
“We have no other place to look,” Lady Cynthia pointed out. “All we have is dream and legend.”
“And the deliriums of a dead Hun,” Folkestone added. He looked to Hand. “You may not believe yourself intimate with Mars outside the highlands, Sergeant, but you know the planet a good sight better than any of us. Please confer with Krios and have him change course, then guide him down when we get to Mars.”
Hand nodded, pushed away from the table and started for the control centre. Halfway there he stopped dead in his tracks, but only for a moment, and he refused to look back.
Bloody hell! he thought.
Following the Captain’s orders would mean standing in the midst of the void as the aethership bucked its way through the turbulent upper atmosphere. Unless Black Ray and Daraph-Kor never made it to Mars. He found himself in the position of rooting for the Royal Space Navy…and him in the Army!
“He’s a good man,” Folkestone said softly, smiling as he noted the Martian’s slightly slower pace after his brief pause.
“He’s much more than that, Robert,” Lady Cynthia said. “He is the best friend you have.”
Folkestone made no reply. It was not an admission he would ever make to Hand, much less an outsider, and Lady Cynthia was, despite the several adventures they had shared over the years, an outsider to both the military men, separated from them by her gender, birth and destiny. Lady Cynthia would, he knew, go far in life, propelled by her station and connections, and would likely make a titled marriage. As for himself, he would never be more than a loyal soldier in service to Her Majesty’s Government, and for he and Sergeant Hand that was enough. That shared fate, as much as their bonds of camaraderie and respect, bound the two men together even as they were separated by rank. Unless, of course, Sergeant Hand lost his mind and ever accepted the commission proffered to him from time to time. Folkestone smiled as he tried to imagine an alternate timeline where that would ever happen.
Shadows Against the Empire (Folkestone & Hand Interplanetary Steampunk Adventures Book 1) Page 26
