Ruler of the Realm fw-3

by Herbie Brennan

  ‘What are they, then?’ she asked angrily.

  ‘Hybrids,’ Henry said. ‘Part of our breeding programme.’

  Our breeding programme? The creature speaking through Henry was a demon. Keep it talking. Talk might distract it. Besides, any information could prove useful.

  ‘Your breeding programme?’ Blue echoed.

  The thing dropped all pretence of being Henry now. Even the voice changed, dropping to a low growl that sounded even more frightening for coming from a boy’s mouth. ‘For stronger stock,’ it said. Henry looked at her with cold, blank eyes.

  Blue looked back at the babies floating in the tubes. Some were plump, some looked pale and sickly. All moved slowly in the liquid. Their hands opened and closed. A horrid realisation dawned on her.

  ‘Those are -’

  ‘Part Analogue, part Hael,’ the demon said. Henry’s eyes stared at her. ‘Now we begin the second phase.’

  The silence was so profound it was as if all sound had been sucked from the room. A sick fear rose in her stomach. She was afraid to ask but had to ask. Her voice sounded hoarse, scarcely louder than a whisper.

  ‘What’s the second phase?’

  The thing inside Henry contorted his lips into a smile. ‘A child of Hael born of a faerie mother.’ His eyes flickered to Black John, who squeezed her hand.

  Blue tried to pull away and scream, but the paralysis fell on her again.

  Fifty-six

  Life was always so very difficult without Kitterick. Madame Cardui picked up Lanceline and stroked her translucent fur. The thing was, when one reached a certain age, one’s faculties atrophied. A little pain here, a little ache there… nothing that one couldn’t cope with, of course, especially now they’d developed those marvellous rejuvenation patches. But the woolly-mindedness was a different matter. There wasn’t a spell in the Realm would touch that. Which was why Kitterick was such a boon. Astonishing storage capacity. Lists… records… things to do… old photograms… new plans… he absorbed them all. Honestly, you’d imagine his poor head would burst. But no, in it all went and out it all came at exactly the right moment. Remarkable. Even for a Trinian. She would be quite lost without him. She was quite lost without him. But Pyrgus’s needs took priority.

  Pyrgus. Such a bright young man. And so misguided, as young men often were. This involvement with a Faerie of the Night, for example. Quite dreadful. Alan was right, of course – the lure of the exotic. Forbidden fruit. Young men never thought of much else (except animals in Pyrgus’s case, which was quite odd). She sighed as the ouklo pulled to a halt. She’d been just as bad herself when she was younger. How Daddy squirmed when she told him about the Great Myphisto. A stage career had seemed such a scandal in those days. And Myphisto was so much older than she was.

  She stepped down from the carriage and tapped the side to send it on its way. She was sure she should have emulated Alan and stayed in the palace for the duration of the emergency. But honestly, one craved one’s own bed in times of crisis. One’s own bed and one’s own home.

  ‘I shall find you some minced mouse when we get in,’ she promised Lanceline as she climbed the narrow staircase. The cat (who understood everything, absolutely everything, she said) began to purr.

  Her Guardian triggered on the landing and she waved it away impatiently. Quite hideous how life had to be surrounded by so much security these days. She was quite sure things hadn’t been nearly so bad when she was young. But, of course, when she was young she hadn’t been involved in espionage. An occupation that brought its own risks. She sighed again as she reached the door of her apartment.

  Lanceline growled softly.

  Madame Cardui froze with her hand on the door. ‘What is it, darling?’ she asked.

  Lanceline growled again.

  With the cat still cradled in her arms, Madame Cardui retraced her steps and reactivated the Guardian.

  ‘Report,’ she demanded.

  ‘Full or synopsis?’ the creature asked.

  ‘Synopsis.’

  ‘Authorisation?’

  ‘Codeword: Painted Lady.’

  The Guardian placed his right hand on his turban. ‘Accessing…’ Then, ‘No visitors, Madame Cardui. No attempted access. No incidents, no accidents. Safeguards intact. Securities intact. No repairs necessary. Last system initialisation, twenty-two hundred hours. Situation normal. Shall I reset, Madame Cardui?’

  ‘No,’ Madame Cardui said absently as she turned back to the stairs. As she reached her door, Lanceline moved uneasily in her arms.

  ‘It’s all right, darling,’ Madame Cardui told her.

  Spell-driven securities were all very well, but even the most sophisticated system could be circumvented if one had enough resources. But Alan (dear Alan!) had taught her one very special trick – new to the Realm, although he claimed spies often used it in the Analogue World. She crouched down and felt for the invisible thread she’d stretched across the bottom of the door. It was intact. No one had come in this way.

  Madame Cardui opened the door.

  The apartment was in darkness. ‘Lights,’ she commanded. All systems activated at once, sending elaborate spell patterns crawling across the walls, switching on the soothing music, bringing up the soft pink lighting she favoured.

  The killer was waiting for her in the middle of her living quarters.

  He was dressed in black from head to toe and wore the dark glasses of a Faerie of the Night. Wrapped around his forehead was a sweatband bearing the insignia of the Assassins’ Guild. Like most assassins, he was small and wiry, but he carried Halek daggers in each hand. He had been waiting – heavens only knows how long – in the Death Crouch, preparing for the moment she returned.

  ‘Fang,’ whispered Madame Cardui.

  Lanceline launched from her arms in a blur of light. She hit the assassin at the level of his knee and streaked up his body to his face, attacking with all four paws simultaneously. The lenses flew across the room and he screamed in shock as she shredded his eyes. Then she went for the artery in his throat.

  As the corpse lay twitching on the floor, Lanceline walked daintily away to leap back into Madame Cardui’s arms.

  ‘Minced mouse,’ she murmured sensuously.

  Fifty-seven

  The pass was working! Pyrgus hadn’t really dared to believe it, but he’d been stopped by three different sets of guards now and each time he’d produced it, they’d waved him on with bows and smiles. Amazing the cultural differences with Haleklind. You’d never catch a Faerie of the Light letting a total stranger wander freely through his home, nor a Faerie of the Night, that was for sure.

  Although it wasn’t exactly freely, of course. Some doors were locked. The door to Ogyris’s office, for example, and the door to Ogyris’s private study. In fact, quite a few doors were locked. You could wave the pass at them as much as you liked, but they stayed firmly shut. No question of breaking in either, with guards likely to turn up at any moment. He might be allowed to go anywhere, but no pass gave him burglary rights. Which was a pity. There might have been interesting documents in the office or the study.

  Still, no complaints. Kitterick was proving worth his weight in gold. The pass allowed Pyrgus to come and go as he pleased, which meant he could go outside and take a really close look at the glasshouse. He’d worry about getting into it when he reached it.

  Pyrgus strode out the front door, waving his pass at the portraits of Ogyris ancestors on the hallway walls.

  He found the glasshouse easily enough. It was now fully dark outside and the building was illuminated as it had been on his first visit. He remembered Gela’s comment that her father relied on magical protections rather than draw attention by posting guards, but even so he was cautious. He waited minutes, listening, before he approached too closely.

  Nothing had changed. The crystal flowers were still inside, planted in neat rows. He peered through the glass (taking great care not to touch it), unable to believe they were living plants. But they sti
ll seemed beyond the skill of an artist. Every bloom was absolutely perfect, every crystal leaf and stem was a marvel in its own right. Each flower glowed softly underneath the growglobes. Starlight reflected in their depths.

  He was wasting time. Poetic musings wouldn’t get Blue back. He needed to know more about these flowers, and Gela said they were spell-protected.

  Pyrgus stood trying to remember exactly what she said, and at the same time trying to figure out what spells he would use to protect something really precious. Since money was no object with Merchant Ogyris, you could be sure they’d be heavy-duty magic. And since the flowers were very special the chances were the protections would involve lethal force.

  It would have to start with the glass. He was fairly sure that’s what Gela had told him as well. Keep away from the glass, she’d said, or words to that effect. She thought the glass was dangerous. Pyrgus thought the glass was dangerous.

  An idea struck him and he began to circle the glasshouse, carefully examining the ground. Sure enough, when you looked closely, the grass hid the remains of insects in huge numbers and he came across the bodies of several dead birds with burn marks on their feathers. That made a lot of sense if his theory was right. Anything that flew into the glass was incinerated.

  Which meant it had some sort of high-energy coating.

  Pyrgus felt a sudden chill. You could short-circuit a high-energy coating with a Halek knife.

  It was hideously dangerous, of course. Halek knives sometimes shattered when you used them, sending their energies back up your arm to stop your heart. (The reason they were more often used to threaten than to kill.) But a soldier once told him that if you used a Halek on an object with a spell charge, the chances of its shattering rose as high as one in three. Only lunatics used Haleks on an object with a spell charge.

  But that sort of thinking wouldn’t get Blue back and stop a civil war.

  Pyrgus drew his Halek knife. The fine-wrought blue crystal blade reflected back the light from the glasshouse. Would it shatter, if he used it on the glass? One chance in three, the soldier said.

  Pyrgus hesitated. What if he used it and it only broke through a single pane? That could easily happen if each one was coated individually. Some panes were large enough for him to squeeze through, but many of them weren’t. He’d have to pick his target carefully – he certainly wasn’t going to risk using his Halek blade more than once.

  He circled the building again, paying close attention to its structure this time. Then he circled it again and stopped in front of the entrance door. It was constructed of one large pane and several smaller. He could squeeze through the large pane provided it shattered entirely. But the thing was, if only part of it broke he might still be able to reach through and open the door from the inside. It was very unlikely that Merchant Ogyris would have ordered interior coatings. The point was to keep people out, not threaten anybody who happened to be working inside.

  Pyrgus licked his lips and tapped the blade absently against the palm of his left hand. Did he have the courage to do this? He could feel the tingle of the trapped forces as they writhed beneath the surface. One chance in three that he was seconds away from death.

  He thought of Blue and stabbed the glass.

  The result was astounding. Magical energies surged from the blade, but the blade itself did not break. (It didn’t break! Yes! Thank you, Powers of Light!) The pane cracked loudly, then fell in a tinkling heap at his feet. But before he could move, cracks were spidering across every surface of the building. Pane after pane shattered, sending shards tumbling. The snapping sounds grew louder. The cracks spread further and further. Huge plates of glass fell forward to smash into the growing heap of fragments on the ground. Whole panes fell out intact, then broke as they hit. In seconds, Pyrgus was surrounded by a tempest of broken glass. The noise was mind-numbing.

  ‘Whoops,’ Pyrgus murmured.

  He was standing beside the naked skeleton of a glasshouse. Not one single pane survived intact. There was no way the noise could have gone unnoticed. He had minutes at best to do what was needed. After that, the guards were here for sure.

  Pyrgus sheathed his blade and stepped through the empty doorway, his shoes crunching on the broken glass. The growglobes had survived, strung high above from the framework of the building. There was broken glass inside but the crystal flowers seemed miraculously intact.

  He glanced around guiltily. It was a total mess. He was in so much trouble now. With Merchant Ogyris. With Gela. Probably with half the Realm. The destruction was unreal!

  But no time to worry about that. Close up he could see Gela was right – the flowers were living things. Their stems were planted in rich earth with a new-fangled thread system providing nourishment and moisture. Some of them even had small shoots sprouting at the base.

  He still had no idea what they were and precious little time to find out.

  He’d already risked so much now that any other risk seemed small. He reached out, snapped the stem of the nearest flower and dropped it into his pocket. He’d never find the secret of the flowers here. His only hope was to carry some away and investigate them later, hopefully with some help from people who knew more about all this than he did.

  He was reaching for another crystal bloom when the guards fell on him like a tree.

  Fifty-eight

  Pyrgus fought like a fury. But guards were racing in from all directions until he was surrounded by a milling mass of close on a hundred. Even if he’d used the Halek blade again he’d never have broken out. In moments he was on the ground, wrestled down by the weight of bodies.

  ‘Hold him, boys!’ a coarse voice ordered.

  Two of the boys grabbed his arms. Two more helped to drag him to his feet. Pyrgus stopped struggling. He was ringed by men now, every one of them a lot more heavily armed than he was.

  ‘Shall I search him, sir?’ someone asked. ‘He may be carrying a weapon.’

  ‘I’m carrying a pass from Madame Ogyris,’ Pyrgus said.

  ‘Pass, is it?’ asked the officer. He looked pointedly at the massive wreckage of the glasshouse.

  ‘Let me show you,’ Pyrgus offered. There was no chance the pass would make a difference, but if he played for time he might think of something more sensible.

  He felt one of the soldiers loosen the grip on his arm and jerked it free. The man didn’t bother to grab it back: Pyrgus wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘I have it here,’ Pyrgus said. It occurred to him it might change things if he told them who he was. They could decide to kill him on the spot, of course, but he was still a Prince of the Realm, so they might think of handing him back to the palace authorities. Or they might decide to bounce on their noses all the way to Haleklind. But whatever. He had to do something.

  He reached into his pocket for the pass and his hand closed over the crystal flower. As he began to draw it out, one of the soldiers shouted, ‘Watch out – he’s got a weapon!’

  Half a dozen men hurled themselves upon him again. Pyrgus’s arm jerked and his hand tightened convulsively. The bloom dissolved into glittering dust beneath his fingers.

  All movement stopped. The guards stood frozen as if turned to stone.

  Fifty-nine

  The demons carried Blue into a different room.

  There was a strange bed with a bright red counterpane and ridged metallic tubes snaking from its underside to disappear into the floor. Glowglobes in the ceiling were set low to a soft pink light so that shadows crawled out of darkened corners. There was a viewscreen set into one wall. There was nothing else.

  The demons withdrew. Henry collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  ‘Oh God, Blue,’ he wailed, ‘I’m so sorry!’

  Blue’s paralysis broke and the slime of Hael control slipped from her mind. She spun round as the door slid shut. Henry was weeping now, but it was the old Henry, the one she knew, not the thing that had been talking through him. She knelt beside him, hesitated, then placed one hand on his shakin
g shoulder.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked softly.

  For a moment he couldn’t answer, couldn’t even look up. Then he turned his tear-stained face towards her.

  ‘They made me do it, Blue,’ he said.

  Blue cradled his head like a child. ‘I know, Henry. I know.’

  They stayed like that, huddled together on the floor, for a long time. Eventually the weeping stopped and Henry pulled away gently.

  ‘I’m fine now. I’m better.’

  Blue said, ‘I need to know what’s happening. I need to know what’s going on.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you know?’ She wasn’t sure how much he’d remember.

  Henry started to climb to his feet. He looked wretched, almost ill. For some reason he avoided catching her eye.

  ‘They told you about their breeding programme,’ he muttered.

  Blue shuddered, thinking of Black John. ‘It won’t happen,’ she said firmly. ‘I’d kill myself first.’ She caught his expression. ‘What’s wrong? You can’t believe I’d…? With a demon?’

  Henry said, ‘It’s not with a demon, Blue. It’s with me.’

  Sixty

  ‘The flowers stop time!’ Pyrgus announced dramatically. He could hardly believe it himself, but he was excited and frightened all at once. The only problem was he still didn’t know where Henry had taken Blue. But now he knew how and maybe they could work it out from that.

  Mr Fogarty, still in his nightshirt and bedsocks, glared at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked.

  ‘They stop time!’ Pyrgus repeated. ‘I was surrounded by guards and I crushed a flower and it stopped time. The guards froze, but I could still move. That’s how I got away.’

  ‘Stasis spell?’ Fogarty frowned.

  ‘No,’ Pyrgus said excitedly. ‘The flowers stop time. Time stops for everybody except the person who crushes the flower. I just walked away, got into my flyer and zipped back here.’ He looked at Mr Fogarty, grinning like an idiot. ‘The trip back took five minutes! But that’s because time was stopped for most of the journey. That’s how I knew it wasn’t a stasis spell. It’s like the flower surrounds you with a bubble and the bubble’s outside everybody else’s time and you can race about and do things while they’re all waiting for the next clock tick. If it hadn’t worn off before I got here, I wouldn’t be able to talk to you now.’