As a diversion, he glanced through the carriage window. ‘This isn’t the way to the palace,’ he said at once.
‘No, sir, indeed not, sir. That’s because we’re not going to the palace, sir.’
‘Where are we going?’ Pyrgus frowned.
‘Not at leave to say, sir. Security, sir.’
That was typical of Blue. She was nearly as paranoid as Mr Fogarty. All the same, it had to be something pretty serious for her to want to meet him somewhere other than the palace.
A thought struck him and he asked, ‘Am I the only one coming to this meeting?’
‘Couldn’t say, sir,’ said the Captain.
The seat squeezed Pyrgus’s bottom distractingly. He ignored it and looked out of the window again. Maybe he’d been a bit hasty in ignoring Blue’s first messages. She might be bossy, but she wasn’t stupid and she was Queen now, with responsibility for everything that happened in the Realm. She knew how he felt about affairs of State, so she would hardly have sent for him if it hadn’t been important. The very least he could do was give her a bit of support. He scowled. Now he was feeling guilty.
The carriage, he realised, was leaving the city through Cripple’s Gate. Which meant Blue had called her little meeting not just away from the palace, but away from any of the official residences. In all probability she’d hired somewhere, or, even more likely, had Madame Cardui arrange a safe house. He wondered where it was.
Nearly twenty minutes later, it turned out to be a small manor house surrounded by trees and so many security devices it was all Pyrgus could do to keep from laughing. He’d really have to talk to Blue about all this nonsense. Except the figure on the doorstep wasn’t Blue.
It was Black Hairstreak.
Thirteen
Henry froze. This was straight out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The craft was massive – easily the size of two or three articulated trucks – and hung, humming, perhaps six feet above the surface of the road (which was vibrating just the way the ground at Mr Fogarty’s had done, he thought inconsequentially). It was like the fake photographs of every flying saucer he’d ever seen – a shining metal disc with a bump on the top and light streaming down from the bottom. There was a row of small, round portholes (although he couldn’t see anything through them) and above them another circle of lights. Any minute now, if this was the movies, it would put down a silvery ramp and a little green man with a big head and enormous eyes would walk out.
The saucer put down a silvery ramp and a little green man with a big head and enormous eyes walked out.
Henry tried to run, then suddenly felt very calm.
In his calm, frozen state he became very much aware of everything around him. Particularly the silence. There was no traffic noise. The little background sounds of night animals and insects had stopped. The saucer was no longer humming.
It was a beautiful saucer. Very beautiful indeed.
The little man was definitely green, but not bright green or olive green or grass green or anything like that. If you were filing a report for the police (although it was silly to think of filing a report for anybody) you would strictly need to say he had a greenish tint to his skin, which was otherwise grey.
The little green man turned in his direction. His eyes were very big and very black and very beautiful. If Henry looked deeply into them, he could see stars and constellations. He could see the depths of Space. The little green man began to walk in Henry’s direction.
Somewhere buried deep inside the Henry who was calm there was a second Henry screaming to get out. The second Henry was in a panic, hysterical, terrified. The second Henry wanted to fight, wanted to smash the little man down, mash him into the ground underfoot like a bug (and could probably have done it too since the little man’s limbs were spindly as twigs). But most of all, the second Henry wanted to run away from the little green man and the big glowing saucer as if the devil himself were after him.
Henry screamed, but no sound came out. He couldn’t move. The little green man was looking at him and he was completely paralysed. It occurred to him he might be about to die.
The little green man looked deep into his eyes and climbed into his head.
It was horrible having somebody inside his head: like an insect crawling relentlessly into his ear, only worse. The little green man crawled relentlessly into Henry’s mind, lifting up flaps here and there to look at Henry’s private thoughts. Look, there was Henry’s sister Aisling with a dagger sticking out of her head. Look, there was Blue in her bath. Look, there was Henry’s mum explaining why everything she did was actually for Henry’s benefit.
The little green man seemed to be looking for something. Or maybe just making sure who Henry was. He crawled and crawled and poked and prodded. Once he watched a memory of Henry sitting on the loo. There was nowhere he couldn’t go, nowhere he didn’t go.
And then he withdrew.
A beam of bright blue light emerged from the flying saucer and played over Henry. Although he didn’t move, he felt as if he was turned upside down to stand on his head. Then he turned the right way up again and began to tremble. The tremble became a vibration and the vibration became a scream. The blue light began to draw Henry up off the road towards the flying saucer.
Something in Henry told him he must be dreaming. It was the only thing that made sense. He must have got tired walking home and lain down by the side of the road for a little nap. Now he was dreaming. He had to be dreaming, because there was no door in the saucer and he was floating through the metal hull, which was impossible unless he was dreaming.
Henry was inside the flying saucer. The light was gone, the little green man was gone and there didn’t seem to be anybody else in there. He was no longer paralysed either. He could move his hands and his arms and his legs. In fact he felt normal. But what was happening wasn’t normal. He was on board a flying saucer and the aliens had toddled off somewhere. That meant he could escape.
He wanted to escape. God knew he wanted to escape. But…
There was something wrong with him. He knew it for certain now. He wasn’t dreaming. This was too real to be dreaming. But at the same time it was exactly like a dream. Things happened. Now the thing that happened was he found himself exploring, not escaping.
The saucer was even larger on the inside than it looked from the outside, like a tardis. He was in a room with silver walls and a soft, squishy floor that seemed somehow… organic. There were no windows and he couldn’t find the light source. (Although there was light: a friendly rosy glow.) There was a door without a handle, but as he approached, it slid open automatically the way doors did in Star Trek . Or Tesco’s.
He was in a corridor that meandered like a stream. And little branches meandered off it – often only a few yards long – leading into other chambers. Some had doors, some hadn’t. Henry meandered with the corridor and discovered chambers with metallic pods, chambers with weapons racks (the weapons looked like laser rifles), a chamber stuffed with giant eggs. (At least he thought they might be giant eggs, since they were large and white and egg-shaped.) He seemed to wander for hours, peering into chamber after chamber. The funny thing was, he never found a kitchen or a bathroom.
He found a horrible, scary room.
Henry opened the door and was half blinded by a sudden glare. Then his eyes adjusted and he was looking at banks of huge transparent tubes, each one larger than he was. There was a maze of wires and piping running from the tubes to a control console in the middle of the room. Nearly half the tubes were lit by violet light so you could see there was a thick, gooey liquid inside, bubbling like a great, slow fish-tank. Floating in the liquid were scores of naked human babies, their eyes tight shut, their little hands opening and closing together in a ghastly rhythm.
Henry tried to break open the tubes to let the babies out, but the tubes were made from some sort of glass that wouldn’t break. He wondered if he could figure out how to open them using the console, but was afraid he might accidentall
y hurt the babies. After a while he left the chamber in an agony of frustration.
Behind him, the babies opened their hands and closed their hands… opened their hands and closed their hands… opened…
Henry found a porthole and looked out. He expected to see the road where he’d been walking, but instead he was looking into a blackness peppered by the brightest stars. He was looking into Space. The saucer had taken off. There was no possibility of escape any more.
A great sadness overcame Henry and he lay down beside the porthole to have a little sleep.
He woke surrounded by little green men staring at him with enormous black eyes. They were directed by a tall, fair-haired woman who looked completely human and was very, very beautiful.
‘ I want to show you something, Henry,’ said the woman, and he heard her quite distinctly even though she had not moved her lips.
The tall, beautiful woman looked at him sadly. ‘ I want to show you what will happen if humans do not learn to treat their planet with respect.’ She turned to gesture at a viewing screen built into the wall behind her.
The screen lit up with images of a devastated world. He watched cities razed by nuclear war. He saw oceans curdled with pollution. There were children starving as the Earth was over-populated. (White children, too, not just the familiar wide-eyed, pot-bellied kids from Africa.) There were people whose faces were a crawling mass of cancers as the ozone layer finally collapsed. There were hurricanes and earthquakes, tidal waves engulfing entire continents. There were radiation mutants, no longer really human, crawling across barren wastelands.
Henry tried to look away, but could not move his head. ‘ Will you tell them? ’ asked the woman. ‘ Will you warn them what will happen? ’
Other voices chorused in his head: ‘ Henry will be the Anointed! ’
Without warning, Henry was naked, lying on a gurney. He was surrounded by little green men, but now they were wearing white coats. To his embarrassment, the beautiful woman was there too. She was also wearing a white coat. Beside the gurney were trays of surgical instruments and some sort of machine with angled arms and drills and scalpels that looked as if it had been put together by a mad dentist.
The beautiful woman smiled benignly. ‘ You must be prepared,’ she said.
‘ Henry will be King,’ the voices chorused. ‘ Henry will be the Anointed King.’
Alien hands reached out to touch him. There was a flooding smell of antiseptic. A foam sprayed across his body, cool at first, then burning acid so he could hardly bear it until something else flowed over him and washed it off. The creatures probed his bottom and his genitals.
‘ Leave me alone! ’ thought Henry, but found he couldn’t speak.
‘ Prepare the implant,’ said a harsh voice in his mind, different to any of the voices he’d heard before.
The beautiful woman was leaning over him, still smiling broadly. In her hand was the dentist’s drill, which spun with a high-pitched whine. But she wasn’t bringing it towards his mouth: she was bringing it towards his eye.
Henry began to scream and couldn’t stop.
Fourteen
‘It makes sense,’ Blue said.
They were seated among the orchids in the conservatory behind the Throne Room. It was a strange place for a Council of War, but her father had protected it with so many spells it was the most private chamber in the palace.
Blue’s eyes moved from one to the other. Gatekeeper Fogarty still looked an old man, but the rejuvenation treatments were beginning to bite. There was an energy about him and he had better skin. Beside him, Madame Cardui was sitting with her eyes closed, but Blue knew she was very much awake. These two were her friends. The disapproving looks came from the three uniformed Generals: Creerful, Vanelke and Ovard. She wished Pyrgus would get here. She felt outnumbered.
Blue licked her lips. ‘Look at it the way they will,’ she said. ‘Everything’s been topsy-turvy for months. Uncle Hairstreak has tried to take over the throne twice and failed -’
‘Which is precisely the reason why he’s unlikely to try again, Majesty,’ General Ovard put in patiently.
He’d been her father’s closest military advisor. But she could not afford to show weakness. ‘Let me finish, General.’ Then, without waiting for a response, she turned to the others. ‘Hairstreak’s still ambitious. And even though he failed, the Faeries of the Night still back him.’
‘They won’t have much stomach for another failure,’ Ovard muttered.
This time Blue ignored him. ‘Now look at the other side of the picture. We came close to losing first time. What ha-’
‘Oh, come, Your Majesty, I’d hardly say we came close to losing.’ Not Ovard this time but General Creerful. They were old men. Senior military were always old men. Empress or not, they would never take her seriously. They looked at her and saw a little girl.
Blue glared at him. ‘My father, the Purple Emperor, was murdered, General. I’d say that brought us pretty close to losing.’
Creerful dropped his eyes and said nothing. After a moment, Blue went on, ‘What happened next was a clever plot that could have succeeded. In fact, it very nearly did. Don’t forget my brother was banished from the Purple Palace. We were very, very lucky to find the allies we did. We could never have turned the tide without them. We can’t count on that sort of luck a second time and my uncle knows it.’
Madame Cardui opened her eyes. ‘The Forest Faerie are our friends,’ she said gently. ‘I’m certain they might be persuaded to help us again.’
Blue admired Madame Cardui hugely, but she fixed her with a steady gaze. ‘The Forest Faerie are your friends,’ she said firmly. ‘That’s not the same thing. When they helped us before, their own interests were involved. We can’t be sure they’ll help us again.’
Madame Cardui nodded mildly and closed her eyes again. ‘Perhaps you’re right, Majesty.’
Blue turned back to the others. ‘Now look at what’s happened the way a Faerie of the Night would. The Purple Emperor was killed. The new Purple Emperor abdicated. Now there’s a child on the throne. And a girl-child at that!’
Suddenly everybody was talking at once. Even Madame Cardui opened her eyes again.
Blue held up a hand for silence. ‘ Look at it!’ she said fiercely. ‘I’m only just sixteen years old. I have no experience of politics or fighting wars or anything like that. And I’m a girl. It’s only because my brother didn’t want the throne that I’m here now. I’d never have become Queen. I was supposed to grow up quietly and marry some foreign prince and give him lots of stupid babies. I wasn’t supposed to know about affairs of State. I was supposed to look pretty and get on with it. That’s how my father saw me. That’s how my uncle sees me. That’s how I’m seen by the Faeries of the Night.’
Gatekeeper Fogarty spoke for the first time since the meeting began. ‘She’s right,’ he said.
Blue glanced at him gratefully. ‘Put yourself in their place. Your enemy has already been weakened and is now being led by a child who knows nothing about anything. Can you think of a better time to attack?’
Fogarty said stonily, ‘So what’s your solution?’
This was it. Despite his question, Mr Fogarty knew where she was heading. It was time the others did the same.
‘I told you my solution before we started this meeting, Gatekeeper. We attack first.’
General Ovard choked, then rounded on her apoplectically. ‘That will start a civil war!’
Blue took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ she said.
There was a long silence, which General Vanelke eventually broke. He was the oldest of the three Generals, a veteran of several campaigns and usually the first to voice an opinion. He’d been uncharacteristically quiet throughout this meeting, but now he cleared his throat.
‘You are a child, Majesty,’ he said bluntly. ‘If we’re honest, we all have to acknowledge that, and it’s the job of older heads to guide you where we can. But far more important is the fact you’ve never s
een a war. The first Nighter action was halted before it really got under way. The second was an act of treachery that produced one small battle. Neither time came to war. But it’s war you’re proposing now, Majesty.’
Watching him, Blue nodded. ‘Yes. Your point being, General Vanelke?’
‘My point,’ said the old General soberly, ‘is that those who have never experienced war are often fastest to go to war. They simply don’t appreciate the enormity of the step.’ He leaned forward. ‘Let me explain to you, Majesty, what war – and especially civil war – will mean to the Realm. First and foremost, it will mean death. Not hundreds, but thousands, perhaps even millions would lose their lives. And not the old and the useless, but the youngest and finest, the very flower of our Realm, with the greatest potential and the very best of their lives ahead of them. The loss of just one such would be a tragedy. War multiplies that tragedy beyond calculation.’
Blue made to comment, but he held her with his eyes and pressed on. ‘Secondly, there will be pain. To you, Majesty, war is a decision, a stroke of the pen. To others, it may be the loss of their arms or legs, blindness, disability. And not just your soldiers, Majesty. They’re arguably paid to accept such risks. But civilians will suffer too. In any civil war, civilian casualties are always enormous.
‘Then there will be destruction. Even a short, decisive war – which civil wars seldom are – causes widespread destruction. Weapon spells have reached formidable proportions nowadays. Our enemy is well-equipped. Are you ready to inflict such spells on your people? Are you ready to count the cost that will be paid by future generations?’ He squared his shoulders. ‘And finally,’ he said, ‘although you may consider this treasonable, there is the possibility that we will not win.’
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