Cloud Castles (30 page)

‘Eh?’

‘In the Graal’s service. You’d make a Graal Knight, I’m sure of it. You fight like one already. As I’ve cause to know. And, of course, you’ve got the sword already.’

‘I’d sooner fight with you than
with
you, if you take my meaning. We make a good team.’

‘Yes. Yes, we do.’ She was silent a moment. ‘Dragovic was our best swordsman, outside the Knights. I was afraid he would kill you. I wish now I’d let him try. You’d have cut him into collops.’

‘I was tired. I’m glad you didn’t. He just about had me.’ We came to the fence at the far end; it was tall, and we were weary, and the gate was way down the far end. We exchanged glances, and then I drew my sword. ‘I dub thee Lutz,’ I told the fence, and hit it, hard. There was a sound like somebody smashing a giant harp, and we jumped back as the wires parted and a great triangle of fence unrolled.

‘I dub thee Dragovic!’ said Alison, and swatted the swathe again. It twanged loose, tore away from the posts and sagged, leaving a nice wide gap. Somewhere alarms were probably going off, but that was the least of our problems.

‘Dragovic,’ I repeated, as we stepped wearily out into the long street. ‘I wish it had been him. And what was that about everyone knows there are traitors? In that place? With the Graal there? How do they dare – and, come to that, why?’

‘Oh, there always are traitors in times without a king. There’s nothing to hold the loyalty of the ordinary townspeople, the ones who never normally go near
the Graal. Not in the Graal’s direct service, I’m certain.’ She smiled again suddenly, warmly. ‘Those it touches never renege. But among minor functionaries, postulants, maybe an occasional probationer – people hungry for success, but unsure of it – they might be tempted. Especially if they know they’re unworthy. But him – no, I’d never have guessed. In fact I remember ruling him out. He seemed … well, very dedicated, very good at organizing the City Guard, but … a little absurd. Always straining after becoming a Knight when anyone could have told him he wasn’t suitable – almost everyone did. But he was so ambitious, so determined to get into the Brotherhood, to bypass a spell as probationer – and that’s just what a traitor wouldn’t want, you see. Because it would mean facing the Graal.’

‘It would find him out? Kill him?’

‘It would see right through him. But kill him, no! Try to cure him, maybe. The Graal’s like that. The problem might be to stop him killing himself, when he saw his inner self laid bare like that. It’s not a comfortable experience, however lightly the Graal tries to let you off.’

‘The Graal!’ It was getting on my nerves, and other sensitive parts. Her voice went positively gooey every time she mentioned the thing. It seemed like a stupid weakness, a flaw in a bold, independent character like this. ‘You know you talk about that thing as if it was a person?’

She gave me a very wry look. ‘Not a person! Something much, much more … But okay, I’m sure of this, it was somebody once. Part of it, anyway. When it speaks to you …’ For a moment her head lifted and she seemed to stare into infinity, like Jyp at his helm. ‘You can’t help sensing the humanity there; everyone does. It isn’t just some roaming intelligence from the Rim. It’s experienced a human life; maybe many lives. It might have been many people once. But there’s something else there, something …’ She made a vast expansive gesture, the flat of her hand tracing an arc above her head, as if a rainbow crowned it. It seemed to fill the darkness with eerie presence.

‘You’re saying … a god?’

She laughed outright. ‘Oh, no! It’s anything but infallible; it makes mistakes! And it can be defeated. It has been, often – but never entirely. Me, I’m a new face around there, but from
what the older Knights tell me, it’s been weak for a century or more, as the Core sees it. But it doesn’t give up; it goes on. It goes on recruiting people, selecting them and refining them, sending them out to serve … causes.’

The word made me chuckle slightly, it sounded so Victorian and flannelly. ‘Good, worthy, virtuous ones, I hope.’

And, of course, the woman took me seriously. ‘Oh, no! I’d have thought you knew. There aren’t any purely good causes in the Core – it’s not the place for absolutes, it’s where everything mixes up and ferments. No, just causes that’ll do mostly good – that’s as much as you can ask for, here. That, and stop worse ones spreading – stop the old barbarism in its tracks. But that’s mostly unnatural. That mostly comes from other forces outside, ones that feed on anarchy and pain. That’s what the Brocken is – or rather, what dwells there. We’ve known that one for a long time, since the first waves of settlement came out of the East across Europe, thousands of years before Christ. A mountain-haunting power the Easterners knew simply as
Chernobog.
’

‘The Black God,’ I said, and involuntarily glanced around at the deep sombre shadows of the back-streets as we passed. The cheerful buzz and chatter of the main drag seemed to come from an infinite, unbridgeable distance.

‘Yes. In those days it lay very close to the Core, separated by the thinnest of veils, free to spread its insanity almost everywhere it chose. The Graal pushed it back, it and others. There are plenty of others.’

‘And you say most of the foul-ups in the Core and so on come from them? I don’t buy it, sorry. I mean, sure these guys are bad, they’ve got to be fought and all that. But men – men seem determined to meet them half-way, given what they’ll do to one another without any prompting. Or even to themselves.
Against stupidity
, remember? Nothing stands against that.’

She whirled to face me. ‘
We
stand against that. We, the Knights, the Brotherhood – though there are plenty of women among us, in times and societies that permit it. In war we fight, in peace we work.’ She smiled one of those sweetly acid smiles. ‘Work like mine, often – the sort of thankless, gritty work that helps hold the fabric of a reasonable society together. A lot of people are recruited from jobs like that.’

I caught something hanging in the air. ‘The way you were?’

‘Yes, like me. Unhappy, embittered, out of tune with our time, like me. The Graal gives us strength to
continue, and powers to help us. But it can’t avoid a racking dilemma that seems to go with them. The further we advance, the more tension we feel about which world we really belong in, the more we feel torn apart—’

‘Yes! Jesus, yes!’ Suddenly my neck was aching, the tendons white-hot with the misuse they’d had tonight. A lot of old stress was back, and the dank chill of the night wasn’t helping. Alison stared at me, astonished.

‘Steve, what’s – not you, too?’ She caught my nod, and half laughed. ‘God, I’d never have believed it – I still don’t, even! Steve Fisher, the sleek, the confident, the cat who’s licked the cream, God’s gift to suffering women – and all the time you were just as screwed up as me?’ She leaned against a wall and rocked with silent laughter.

‘Thanks for the thumbnail sketch!’ I said sharply. ‘Maybe you should’ve looked a little closer, okay? I was just beginning to like you a bit.’

She stopped laughing suddenly, but she didn’t say anything else, not at first. Then she said, quietly, ‘Sorry. I could say the same. I did, didn’t I? I thought we were on, well, less prickly terms, all right?’

She surprised me again, by putting a hand on my arm. I left it there; I suddenly felt very much in need of any human contact. I nodded. ‘We are. Forget it.’ I glanced around again. ‘You hit a sore spot, that was all. And I can’t take much more of that right now. I’m spooked enough as it is. Keep thinking there’s—’ I stopped, and stared, back down the length of that straight dark street. So did Alison, and her fingers tightened on my arm. We could still see the scrap yard fence from here; and unquestionably now there were figures moving behind it, peering about, searching.

‘So Lutz isn’t going to leave things at that, after all!’ My hand fell to my sword hilt. ‘Maybe we should just settle with them now—’

Her hand was still on my arm. ‘I wouldn’t! Look!’ The figures had spotted the slash in the fence, and converged on it, ducking through one at a time. We’d stepped through together, and we hadn’t had to duck. ‘Night Children! Full-grown!’

We didn’t need to say another word. We moved, quickly, quietly, keeping in shadow now and never quite running in case the flicker of movement caught some
watcher’s eye. ‘Back to the main street?’ I whispered in Alison’s ear. The prospect of lights and company seemed almost like sanctuary.

‘No. Most likely there’ll be half-grown cubs there, they can pass for human – well, you know, you’ve seen them. And we’d lose our lead. Best we keep moving, they’re too heavy to catch up. That bastard!’

I glanced back again. ‘Lutz? Somehow I don’t think this is him at all. He prefers human servants. I think we’ve got two of them on our trail, independently – no prizes for who. That’d account for a lot.’

She cast me one alarmed glance and nodded. ‘You mean why Lutz tried to kill you the moment you’d rejected him? To deny you to Le Stryge? Could be. The old barbarism again, allies who can’t trust each other. Might be why Lutz’s boys didn’t hang around.’

‘Hope so. The ‘copter, as you said; we’ll have to be careful. Look, at least that’s a bend ahead. Once round that and we’ll be out of sight – we can risk running.’

We had maybe half a mile left in us, no more. After that we were near as dammit walking, despite the drizzle that was coming on again. Another half-mile and we had to stop, collapsing into a nice cosy stone doorway. A last chill drop from somewhere struck my cheek and trickled down. I looked up, and saw the moisture collecting on a brass plate commemorating some famous building that stood on this spot – until 1945. Alison followed my glance. ‘Barbarism. A souvenir.’

I sighed. ‘Surely we’re getting over that? I mean, okay, we’re still bickering and bilking each other, but we’re drifting into some kind of European union, aren’t we? A lot nearer than we’ve ever been before?’

She rubbed her hands over her eyes. ‘That depends. In the Neolithic, when men traded metal and tools the length of Europe, and never fought a war? In the days of the Roman Empire? Or the Holy Roman Empire? Under Napoleon, even, though that one was distorted from the start; it was never meant to happen like that. The French Revolution got off to a good start, then something else took a hand. It gave us the Terror and then Napoleon running things, a megalomaniac
military dictator instead of a constitutional monarchy under Necker.’

‘Who?’

‘Exactly. And sometimes the Graal tried the cultural tack, pulling the politics after – the Carolingian era, the great monastic orders. In medieval times Europe was at peace, relatively speaking, for long periods; links between universities and scholars cut right across political boundaries, with Latin becoming a
lingua franca.
Then there was the Hundred Years War. There was the Enlightenment, then the Terror. There was the nineteenth century – Weimar and Bavaria, then Prussia and Bismarck. Victorian England, then World War I. And nationalism, Nazism, the Cold War, the Iron Curtain and its horrendous aftermath. But that ran its course soon enough, and it left the field wide open. Now, true, there are some signs of accord – oh, not so much the EC itself, with all its blundering and pomposities, more the underlying assumptions that let it exist. But we’re not drifting towards that, as you said. The Graal is the navigator – but there are contrary winds whipping up, and storms ahead.’

I didn’t say anything. I was too busy thinking, trying to reassess history as I’d been taught it, too busy feeling like a small feather in a really big hurricane. She tucked a companionable arm under mine, and huddled against me, welcome warmth.

‘That’s another apology we owe you. We were all on tenterhooks, you see, just wondering where the first assault would come. That was why you got shot at on sight, that first time you appeared. We were expecting some kind of assault on the city, and the patrols were getting trigger-happy. We’d already had troubles with Le Stryge daring to wander around our mountain marches, him and those horrible creatures of his.’

‘You mean those Night Children things? What the hell are they, anyhow?’

She glanced around quickly as something rattled in the street behind us, but it was only a cool gust blowing at a hanging sign. ‘We’d better be going. You know Wolves, of course. Well, the Children appeared a lot more recently as the Core counts time, but if the stories are true they’re making up for it fast.’

I hauled myself to my feet. ‘Another sub-species from the Spiral? Another cross, between humans and—’

‘Others. Yes. The way I heard it is that last century, before the end of World War II, the Russians rounded up a batch of
really
unpleasant Nazi POWs – concentration-camp guards, psychopaths from the punitive battalions, that
sort, men and women both. There were some Croats and Turkish SS too, I think. Their usual procedure with these types was that they were kept in camps for KGB screening and according to their potential put on show trial, shot out of hand or recruited. This lot, men and women both, were sent off under Russian guards – an equally bad lot even by KGB standards, apparently – to a specially remote part of Siberia; only there, it seems, they were forgotten. Supplies dwindled and finally stopped. Life in the camps degenerated; guards and prisoners mingled. They began preying on the local population, such as it was. The collectivization famines, the purges and the war had left no responsible authority within hundreds of miles to stop them. When they couldn’t steal food they stole people. That was common enough; it had happened all over Russia during collectivization. But these creatures took to doing it for pleasure, and to keeping their victims alive to hunt down for sport. Soon enough they were alone in a vast area of emptiness, and … something happened. Meanwhile Stalin died, Beria was murdered; a lot of their officials were liquidated, and secret files opened. Refugees from the area didn’t just vanish any more – at least not without talking, to the right people. When a KGB force was eventually detailed to deal with the camp, it could find no sign of it, and the colonel in command concluded they’d all died in the wilderness. They hadn’t.’ I saw her grimace, and look behind, and walk that little bit faster. ‘Maybe they’d moved out onto the Spiral of their own accord; but I think they were taken there.’