Then other figures were coming towards them, men in dark grey clothing and dark glasses with strange objects in their hands.
Why are those idiots wearing sunglasses at night? he thought. The nearest raised the barrel of one of their devices in his direction.
Everything went white.
Evelyn and Doctor Hargrave were in the deepest part of the facility when the alarms sounded. They had recovered Yadrim’s corpse, sealed it in a time-locked casket and were preparing to lock it away in a vault of rune-scrawled iron. Despite his overcooked appearance, there was a good chance he wasn’t dead. Their bargain had not included helping him if he got into trouble.
Doctor Hargrave took a small tablet computer from his pocket and checked the facility logs. For the first time in decades, Evelyn saw alarm on her father’s face.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’m going to the control room,” Doctor Hargrave said. “Finish locking Mr Yadrim away and join me.” He turned away, still reading his tablet computer. “Bring us both a vial of Compound L.”
He was called Savraith. In the moments after his awakening, he stamped his will upon reality and everyone within the warehouse died.
More words spilled from his desiccated lips. Stripped from the corpses around him, flesh and blood and bone spiralled to him and became a part of him. Organs seated themselves where dried husks had hung. Brittle bones devoured the mineral content of his victims and made themselves strong. His nervous system rewove itself, new blood vessels spread like roots. He knitted muscles to replace the ones long gone and sheathed himself in skin.
Words appeared on every inch of his new body. They were written in a tight script of slashes and dots. There were thousands of them.
He opened new eyes. He drew a first breath. His heart began to beat. The ancient carcass he had tethered himself to was gone. He was alive again.
Savraith lifted his head and tasted the world around him. It was strange to him, barren and empty.
He spoke again. Energy curled out of him and he imprinted versions of his consciousness into it. With a sweep of his hand he sent half a dozen daemons out into the world.
One fell upon the minds it found. It invaded the speech centre of its target and devoured it, along with the unfortunate’s powers of speech. Then it leapt to another, and another. It left a trail of speechless, brain-wrecked people behind it.
The rest poured into the world’s primitive information systems. There were no grand, crystalline archives holding constructed thought-scapes, no lattices of glistening memory beads, no arrangements of morphing snowflake-like thought forms orbiting sun-bright curators. All they found was information distributed across a network of simple machines. Savraith’s sendings consumed information on geography, military power, culture, politics, history, music and science. They left a trail of shattered data centres and corrupted databases in their wake.
They returned and Savraith integrated them back into his consciousness. Everything they had found, he knew.
Ah. This place.
He looked down at the ruins of the machine in which they had tried to capture him. He laughed at their presumption.
Nevertheless he was, after a fashion, deep within a wasteland and the manner of his departure had no doubt caused a stir amongst his colleagues. His return had best be considered carefully.
He sifted through what he had learned and decided where he would go next. He vanished from the warehouse, leaving behind its ruined machinery and stripped corpses without a further thought.
Catherine drew deeply on her cigarette and sent a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling of her living room. It was the last cigarette she would smoke, lit moments previously with shaking hands. There were four left in the pack and she found herself fixating on what a waste that was, buying them and never smoking them.
The bottle of vodka was almost empty but Catherine was a great deal more sober than she wished. Her fear was so great it stopped her feeling like fear; she didn’t even twitch when Savraith appeared in her living room.
He was bare to the waist and below that wore a garment like the ones on the statues of Egyptian pharaohs. She couldn’t help trying to read the writing that covered his bronze skin. It was scrawled across his bare skull, around his eyes and mouth, down his neck. She had the feeling that if he moved the words would change, as if they were projected on him and his skin was just a screen.
“You live in squalor,” he said. He spoke English, but his accent shifted from word to word. “With your talents you should have a palace to yourself and clean-limbed boys to attend your every need.” His hawkish eyes crawled over her features, seen and unseen. “This world has treated you poorly.”
“This is my home you’re talking about.” She drew from her cigarette again. Her hand shook even more.
“I need to see through your eyes,” Savraith said. His bare feet padded across the old rug on her floor. “I need to know things. This barren world of yours offers few expedient options.”
“You’re going to kill me,” she said.
“You will die, yes.” His tone was a polite veneer beneath which he did not even regard her as a person. “But you did try to stop them pulling me from my tomb. For that, at least, I shall give you a gift.”
Catherine stood before three mirrors as attendants finished dressing her. She wore a gown of black silk and thread-of-gold. Rings adorned her fingers and bracelets clasped her slim wrists. Her hair was raised in an elaborate hairstyle that had taken three hours to prepare.
A gong sounded and Catherine turned. Maids fell into columns behind her as she glided through high hallways of marble. Tall men in dress uniforms opened doors as she approached and presented arms as she passed.
In a great hall beneath the gaze of the stars, she sat upon a throne of gold while before her, the Great and the Wise bowed. They had travelled far to hear her words. She already knew the questions they would ask. She raised her head slightly, opened her mouth to speak and died in an instant of searing pain as her gift was torn out of her, just as the flesh had been torn from the men and women in the warehouse where Savraith was summoned.
He looked around with a seer’s eyes. Her gift would not be his for long. It never was, this way, but it would last long enough. He saw the shape of this world as choice and coincidence formed it. He saw who and what could serve as tools. A plan took shape. The chaos of the future narrowed to a set of possibilities.
He began with Trafalgar Square.
Chapter 27 – Friday Night
Fiona blinked and discovered she was two blocks from the Tube station nearest her home. She was walking in the right direction and Jessica was at her side, but she had no memory of the last two blocks.
“How did -?”
There was a flash of strawberry ice cream flavoured light and thirteen gorillas said, “Cellar door.”
She was at the end of her street, waiting on the corner while a car went past. She looked at her feet, as if expecting them to explain what she was doing here.
“Fiona?”
At the sound of Jessica’s voice, there was a flash of light that turned into an upside-down candle in a landscape of jagged grey mountains.
She was standing halfway down the street, staring at a man on the path in front of them and she was aware that Jessica held her hand, squeezing hard.
A red haze clouded Fiona’s mind. She yanked her hand free.
“What are you thinking, doing that to me? Enough people have messed with my head already. I don’t need you banging around in here too.”
“Fiona,” Jessica said. She hadn’t looked away from the man in front of them.
Fiona glanced at him, then did a double-take. He was dressed in normal business attire: a dark grey suit and a yellow tie. But his bald scalp and his face were covered in tattoos. It looked like writing.
His attention was fixed on Fiona. There was nothing remotely sexual about his interest. “Remarkable.”
“Who are you?” Fiona said.
&n
bsp; He reached out a hand as though to grab her. Her shadow, cast out at an angle by the streetlight, slid between them. Surprise, outrage and then calculation flickered across his features. Still with his hand raised, he spoke to her shadow. “I am not going to attack you.”
“What do you –?”
He clamped his hand around her arm. She noticed the writing on the back of his hand. It even wound around his fingers. Before she could pull away there was a great big lurch and she was somewhere else.
Jessica ran down the street as fast as her legs could carry her. Mr Beak swooped past, cawing madly. She noticed the larger than usual number of vans parked in the street, particularly the multi-coloured one, but didn’t think anything of them.
She crashed against the front door, fumbled to unlock it, slammed it behind her and raced upstairs in a thunderous stampede of trainers on wooden stairs.
“I am attempting to locate Miss Fiona now,” Mr Shell said as she exploded into the loft. Several panels on his shell had unfolded and dish-shaped devices swung back and forth.
“She could be anywhere,” Mr Beak said, alighting on the window sill. “Anywhere. You didn’t see him, Shell. He’s a barking wizard!”
“Oh dear,” Mr Shell replied, but he kept sweeping his dishes back and forth.
“Why is that a big deal?” Jessica was already at her scope, firing it up for when Mr Shell had a bearing.
“Writing all over him, Shell,” Mr Beak said. “The most serious of the serious.”
“My word,” Mr Shell said.
Jessica drummed her fingers on her work bench. “Still not making sense here guys.”
“We are dealing with a being of considerable ability, Miss Jessica,” Mr Shell said. “It is unlikely Mr Beak and I will be of any real assistance should we find it necessary to confront him.”
“Which we are not doing,” Mr Beak said.
“I have a bearing, Miss Jessica,” Mr Shell said. “Eighty-seven point one degrees physical. Distance of eight point eight miles.”
“He didn’t take her anywhere outwards then?” Jessica put her eyes to her scope’s lenses and spun the dials.
“If so, only briefly,” Mr Shell said. “I should warn you I had difficulty locking on to Miss Fiona. You may experience similar difficulty.”
“That’s because she’s with a barking wizard,” Mr Beak said. “If you look, he’ll see you.”
She saw nothing at first and then she saw static. But she kept at the controls until a picture resolved.
Jessica found Fiona standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square. Beside her shimmered a void that she understood immediately to be some form of concealment. She made a grumbling noise and thought about how to punch through the so-called wizard’s camouflage and then decided it wouldn’t be wise.
She pulled the picture back. “They’re in Trafalgar Square.” Straightening up, she surveyed her troops. “We need to get there as fast as possible.”
“I regret to say I am not highly mobile,” Mr Shell said.
“We could roll you,” Mr Beak said.
“If only your suggestions were occasionally useful, Mr Beak.”
Jessica went to the window and leaned out. She swept her gaze along all the cars parked along the street. “Let’s find out which of our neighbours own these vans.”
When Evelyn Hargrave woke, she was colder than she had felt in decades. She did not move at first. Instead she revelled in the sensation, in the numbness of her fingers, her lips and the tip of her nose, in the coldness of it in her throat and lungs. She watched her breath steam in the air in front of her.
Then she noticed the empty vial of Compound L near her hand, lying in a pool of her own drying blood.
When the force of the attacker’s mind had picked her up and hurled her into one of the control room’s large screens, she had managed, in her last moments of consciousness, to inject herself with Compound L. It had saved her life.
She sat up slowly. Her father’s corpse lay smashed against the far wall of the control room. The other vial of Compound L she had fetched on the way up from the containment level was in a far corner, shattered and drained.
She and her father had both altered their conscious minds long ago through a series of drug treatments and psycho-hypnotic sessions. Evelyn was capable of shutting her emotions off, disconnecting them from her thought processes. When she saw her father dead, too long dead for Compound L to save him, she detached her emotions from herself.
Mourning, if she had it in her, could come later. First she needed to be sure she was safe. Her life depended on that. Then she needed to be sure the facility was stable. The world counted on that.
Red and amber status lights glowed from every console. The defences were gone, but that she had expected to see. She had watched as the attacker tore through the lines of defence she and her father had spent decades building.
One readout showed a significant power drain. It was not dangerous yet, but if it dropped below a certain level, critical systems vital to the safety of London and to the world itself would fail.
Three of the vaults had been opened. One of them was Yadrim’s.
When she pushed herself up into a crouch, the world did not spin. Compound L had completely restored her, though she would need a session in the flesh-weaving chamber soon. She raised her head just enough to look through the smashed windows and into the sarcophagus chamber.
A glittering array of jagged glyphs was the first thing to catch her attention. They rotated around the control crystals at the top of the black sarcophagus. More glyphs burned a molten red along the main power feeds to the transmission array on the surface.
She could do nothing about any of that directly, so she filed it away in her mind for later consideration. She could see no choice but to retreat and find help from one of the small number of people she and her father had always kept in mind for such a contingency. Jacob Mandellan, she knew, lay in a coma in a hospital. But she had another option now.
She crept across to a console in the corner, lifted up what looked like a telephone receiver, summoned a number from memory and tapped it into the keypad.
Alice lay on Julian’s bed in a room that smelled of someone else. She dimly remembered Kevin, a sycophant who hung around Vivien’s group and was finally turned by Dean. She had not paid much attention. Julian lay beside her, still unconscious from the attack. She watched him breathing.
The sense that death hung over her had vanished. Whatever had threatened to happen was now happening. It was like the sound of distant cannon fire, frightening, but not close yet.
Her eyes wandered to the pulse beating in Julian’s neck. The thirst was there, it was always there, but she had lived long enough to control it. She waited for him to wake and wondered if her anger at him would return then.
The werewolf who wasn’t a werewolf, Robert Cromwell, appeared at the door. His pupils had narrowed to points, his lips pulled back from his teeth. He clung to the doorframe as if nothing else prevented him from lunging at her.
Alice lifted her head and stared at him without speaking. The full moon sailed the sky tonight and she recognised the look of a werewolf barely under control. She waited to see what his moon-addled brain would decide to do next.
“Can’t leave you here with him.” His voice was half a growl. Fear and frustration twisted his face. “Can’t go. Can’t leave you here with him.”
She watched him.
He turned away and was gone in a blink, though not quite fast enough for her to miss. She settled her head on her arm and watched Julian again. She understood werewolves, understood their fierce pack loyalty. She guessed Rob possessed that same instinct and had extended it to cover Julian.
His eyes moved left and right beneath his eyelids. A tendril of his dreams brushed her and she saw fire and mud and death. The intensity of it made her suck in a breath, but the dream was gone almost as soon as it touched her. His mind closed itself again.
One side of his face bore
several part-healed cuts. She’d have though them a week old, but his face had been injury-free the previous night when she saw him in the van. The lines of his face were a little gaunter than she remembered from hours of study in just the same position. He was still too young for hardship to line his face but the beginning of it was there. Wherever he had been for the last four years, wherever he had gone after he abandoned her and everything else in his life, it had not been easy.
He twitched and snapped awake. His eyes flared wide, darted around the room. She waited for them to settle on her. When they did, she wondered what he would say first.
“Rob let you in?”
“You once told me I was always welcome in your home,” Alice said. “Potent words from someone like you.”
She couldn’t tell what he thought of that. The naivety and vulnerability that drew her to young warlocks was gone. He was a stranger to her. When he sat up, she rolled on her back and settled her head against the pillow.
“Who were they?” he asked.
“The men who attacked you were from the Shield Foundation,” she said. “I questioned one of them. Did you know you’re wanted for murder?”
“Did you kill them?”
“Do you care?”
The look in his eyes was all business. “I want to know how much trouble they’re likely to be.”
She sighed. “No, I didn’t kill them. I knocked them out and locked them in a van.”
“Why did you intervene? Last night you were going to kill me.”
“Was I? I couldn’t very well have someone else kill you until I knew for sure one way or the other.”
She watched him think before speaking, in that way he had of choosing his words. “Thank you anyway.” He got up and opened a cupboard.
“Is that it?” she asked. “Is that all you have to say to me?” She was still angry after all.
He took a pair of jeans out of the cupboard, took off his painfully fluorescent trousers and pulled the jeans on. “You want something more?”
“A little cold for an old lover, don’t you think?” she said.
Ghost Electricity Page 27
