Conflagration (54 page)

Jeakqual-Ahrach laughed. “There’s no place to hide in organization.”

Argo, Jesamine, and Raphael moved to their accustomed positions. The Twins line of light was spreading horizontally. The little monsters were up to something. Their light was beginning to crush the volcanic rock. The role of The Four was to keep Jeakqual-Ahrach angry and distracted, and Cordelia had a knack for this. “Will you look at this place? The woman is insane.”

Jeakqual-Ahrach snarled. “You think me insane?”

“This is what she’d do to another dimension.”

Red flame screamed around them and Cordelia used it as cover to ask a question of Raphael. “Do you have the backdoor?”

“I do.”

“What’s happening behind us?”

“The path goes back to a logical horizon, and then to infinity, and, wait a minute, something’s coming down it.”

“What?”

“White children.”

“What?”

“I think the Twins must have summoned them. They are like the Twins, only incomplete and imperfect.”

Cordelia projected, “Like the ones in Paris.”

The Boy Twin gazed back at The Four. “They are our brothers and sisters. The ones who came before us, and were not right. The ones she cast away.”

Cordelia projected again. “The breeding program.”

Raphael shushed her. “There are hundreds of them. The path of light has become a bridge.”

Hundreds of pale-faced children, some resembling the White Twins, but others twisted and deformed, swarmed over the bridge. A number of toy bears, ducks, pandas, parrots, other animals, moved with them, perhaps fragments of bad memory used as disguises. They were all coming for Jeakqual-Ahrach, but they would pass through The Four before they reached her.

Raphael warned, “They will pass through us. Let them do that. Don’t resist.”

Finally Jeakqual-Ahrach noticed what was happening. “The rejects dare to approach ME?”

The horde of white children continued to come ahead.

“Go back to the sewers to which I consigned you.”

The white children kept on coming.

“Go back!”

The white children and the toys kept on coming.

“Stop!”

Jeakqual-Ahrach’s anger erupted to such a pitch that it threatened her own construct. The flow of children faltered, but then moved on again remorselessly. Venomous waves of flame and fury crashed around the diamond throne, as Jeakqual-Ahrach screamed.

“STOP!”

The distant Mothmen moved in protectively, but the Girl Twin raised a hand and the Mothmen halted. The Four experienced the unnerving sensation of having the procession of white children pass through and around them. Small, seething minds brushed against theirs with a touch like bitter feathers. They surged around the White Twins and closed on Jeakqual-Ahrach. For the very first time in their experience, fear suffused the woman’s aura.

“Keep away from me, you misbegotten little fiends.”

But the white children simply surged around her, crawling up onto her diamond throne. Fear was disintegrating the whole construct as they engulfed her, drowning her, even muffling her screams.

“No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!”

The last image that The Four retained was that of Jeakqual-Ahrach’s left arm in a long velvet glove, rings on the fabric fingers, reaching up and clawing for salvation that was not ever going to materialize, and then being pulled down to vanish into the surging sea of terrible, magickal infants.

ARGO

Argo had no idea how he had returned to the terrestrial world from Jeakqual-Ahrach’s collapsing construct. Maybe, as it failed, with no creator to control it, the thing had simply let him go. All he knew was that he was on the ground, on his knees, disoriented, and with his head painfully spinning, not far from where the Great Paris Gun had crashed into the base of the pyramid, slewed sideways off its rails, and wound up canted over to one side, with its wheels spinning, and with avalanches of dirt sliding down beside it from the sloping south face of the pyramid. It was the first time that Argo had been close enough to see the way the surfaces of the massive geometric figure were being progressively covered by a mosaic pattern of the mysterious black spheres and how the overall design was forming into one huge unreadable ideogram on each surface, from an alphabet so alien to him that it might have been from another planet.

Argo, however, found he had no time to dwell on the disposition of the gun, the meaning or purpose of the patterns, and certainly not what had just befallen him in the private realm of Jeakqual-Ahrach. He’d hardly had time to recover his earthly balance when he saw Penhaligon running towards him, waving his arms, and generally acting wholly out of character for the combat-scarred Ranger. “Major Argo, we gotta run, we gotta get the fuck out of here.”

Argo didn’t immediately react. He stood bemused. “What are you talking about?”

Penhaligon was shaking his head, and even attempting to pull Argo along with him. “When the gun hit the pyramid, some weird shit came out of there like an evil wind. We all felt it, but Old Temps went fucking crazy.”

Argo wondered what his own physicality had been doing when the gun hit the pyramid. “What do you mean, fucking crazy?”

“He starts saying he doesn’t trust the electric detonators, and then he tells everyone that they should get out of there, because he’s going to blow up the gun by hand. And blow himself up along with it. He says it’s a fitting end, riding the back of the biggest bomb ever made by man. He starts talking this lunatic shit about it’s his bomb, and he don’t want to be around when they build a bigger one.”

“He means it?”

“I left him sitting astride the barrel of the gun with an old flintlock pistol rigged to the fuse, and him saying that we should fuck off because he wasn’t going to wait too long.”

Argo wasn’t about to let Old Temps blow himself up. Penhaligon might think Perdu had gone insane, but Argo knew it had to be the pyramid getting to him. “I’ve got to talk to him.”

Penhaligon was shaking his head like a maniac. The pyramid was also getting to him. “There’s no talking to Perdu, Major. He just rubs at those scars on his face and goes right on with what he’s doing. And I figure he’s about finished doing it by now. So, begging your pardon, Major, but you can do what you like, because I’m out of here.”

Argo took a last look at the gun half buried in the pyramid, and the small figure of Old Temps Perdu squatting above the breech, and he allowed himself to be persuaded. He and Penhaligon ran maybe twenty paces and then, behind them, and at a distance, they heard Old Temps Perdu give a last triumphant shout. “Fuck you all, you bastards. You should all hope to live so long!”

Argo and the Ranger hit the ground as one. They lay flat and covered their heads with their arms.

No two accounts of the actual explosion at the Pyramid of Amiens were ever the same. Some described how the barrel of the Great Paris Gun had blown up like a balloon before it burst, but Argo had always thought this was hallucination, or pure tall-tale embroidery. Others talked about a blossoming fireball that had risen from the pyramid, hanging momentarily in the air like a second sun before collapsing into a falling pillar of roiling black smoke that was immediately followed by a monumental blast and shock wave that was all that Old Temps Perdu could ever have desired. Argo found the second version of the story a great deal more plausible, especially when told by those at a safe distance. Those like him and Penhaligon, though, who been relatively close to Perdu’s last exit, had really no story to tell. They had simply lain in fear, wishing they could will themselves deeper into the protective ground, as heat swept over them, the shock tossed their helpless bodies clear into the air, and then, moments later, huge chunks of hot metal from the gun screamed down from above and smashed into the ground all round them.

CORDELIA

After the explosion, Cordelia had lain prone, not even daring to move as the hail of debris crashed down. She did not want so much as to open her eyes. She could all too easily imagine red hot jagged iron from the exploded gun slamming into her body. When, at last, she gingerly turned her head and looked, the first thing she saw was Yancey Slide holding out a hand to help her to her feet. Smoke still billowed, and small but mainly harmless particles of debris were still dropping with a patter like falling rain, but the worst was over and she had survived. She gripped Slide’s gloved hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. His unholy brace of pistols was holstered, so she could assume that the firefight was over.

“Do you have any idea how I got here?”

Slide stared down at her from under the brim of his hat. “What do you mean?”

Cordelia slowly turned, taking in a landscape of near-total ruin and devastation. The gun was in pieces, with its shrapnel spread over a couple of acres, and half the pyramid was gone. The flat terrain of the construction site was littered with the very pieces of iron that she had so feared. A huge crater had been gouged out of the nearest side of the pyramid by the explosion, and the pointed apex had collapsed into it. Even as she watched, the process of collapse was still continuing. Tons of dirt and rock were shifting, sliding, and falling away, and made her think of the slow organic death throes of some huge living thing. Although dwarfed by the ruin of the pyramid, the whole of the area presented a grim spectacle of havoc. She saw overturned vehicles, destroyed fences, and barrack huts on fire. At first, she thought the entire field was littered with bodies, but then some previously prone figures began rising to their feet, and she realized that, like her, they had been protecting themselves against the explosion, but now thought it was safe to stand. When the survivors were up, however, many remained who actually were dead or dying, and by far the majority were Mosul and Zhaithan. The numbers of the dead were nothing in comparison to what she had seen in the aftermath of Newbury Vale, but they were enough to give her pause, and cause her to forget her own confusion.

“Damn.”

“Damn indeed. Old Perdu sure made an exit.”

“He died in the explosion?”

“Quite deliberately.”

Cordelia was quiet for a moment. She looked around the field one more time and then turned back to Slide. She had survived, but she wasn’t sure how. “I still don’t know how I got here.”

A flake of ash landed on the sleeve of Slide’s duster, and he brushed it off. “Where do you think you should be?”

Cordelia wasn’t sure. “The last thing I recall was being out on the road, and we had just met the White Twins for real, after they had rather unpleasantly eliminated their Zhaithan escort.”

“The sophisticated mindfuck?”

Cordelia looked bleakly at Slide. “You already know this story?”

“Some of it.”

“You know that Lime channeled Jeakqual-Ahrach, and we were suddenly grabbed up, and all Four of us were taken to her idea of hell?”

“And that Lime was killed by the Twins, and Jeakqual-Ahrach was overwhelmed by the children from her breeding program.”

“You’ve already talked to the others?”

Slide shook his head. “No.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I have some fairly unique sources.”

“And is Jeakqual-Ahrach dead?”

“Who knows for sure? If she’s not physically dead, her powers will be crippled for a very long time, and the failure of this project, and the breeding program, and whatever else she might have had going that we don’t know about, is going to create a political firestorm for the Zhaithan, all over the Empire. As to how you got here, I guess you just all fell out of the construct together.”

“And the Twins? What about the Twins?”

Slide’s face became grave. “I have seen the Twins.”

Cordelia didn’t like his look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Slide turned and started walking. “Follow me.”

Slide walked swiftly and Cordelia had to trot to keep up. She spotted Argo up ahead; he seemed to be staring at something on the ground. She hurried to him, happy to see him alive and unharmed, but when he looked up at her, and she saw the expression on his face, she stopped. “What?”

Argo pointed to what was on the ground. Cordelia looked down and saw that a blackened piece of the Paris Gun had crashed down, making a small smoking crater, and inside it, she could see a ghastly confusion of bloody organs, tiny white limbs, tattered rags, and the unharmed head of the Girl Twin.

Cordelia shook her head. “Shit … no.”

“It must have come down right smack on top of them. It crushed them and all of their secrets along with them.”

“Do Jesamine and Raphael know about this?”

Argo turned away. “No, but they’re coming now.” He pointed to where the other two of The Four were making their way across the litter of destruction. They already looked in shock at what they were seeing, and when they joined Argo, Cordelia, and Slide, a long silence ensued that was finally broken by Jesamine. “We never found out what they really were, or how they were created.”

“Or how they did what they did.”

“Or what they meant about trying to save Jack Kennedy.”

Raphael seemed the least affected by the death of the Twins. “I guess if the remains could somehow be taken to London, Windermere’s ES Section could maybe do an autopsy.”

Jesamine looked at him in surprise. “You really think they’d learn anything?”

“No, but…”

Jesamine became more aggressive. “Or do you want the Norse figuring out how to breed White Twins of their own?”

Raphael backed off. “I was just thinking about science. I mean, they had to die anyway.”

Jesamine blinked. “What?”

Raphael was confused. “I said they had to die anyway.”