Merciless Reason (34 page)

XXXVI

REQUIEM

BY THE TIME NATE EMERGED
from the trees and caught sight of the leviathan again, it had turned around. Gerald was waiting for him, gently playing scales on one of the keyboards. And there was no sign of Tatty. Nate slowed Flash's pace, coasting down the grassy slope as he cast his gaze around, searching for signs of a trap. He pulled up on a hillock overlooking a low bank, staring at Gerald's creature, which stood quietly some forty, yards away. Another hundred yards behind that, Nate could see the Wildensterns' private railway line cutting down into the woods as it descended into the valley to the right.

“What's this all about, Gerald?” he called out, waving at the monster. “The chap with the biggest organ wins?”

“One can always count on you to lower the tone,” Gerald called back. “But then, you never did have a good ear for music.”

“Where's Tatty?”

“I've tied her to the railway tracks, just round the curve,” Gerald told him, indicating behind him. He lifted his head and stared off to Nate's left in an exaggerated manner. “The family will be along any minute now, on board their train. You should just have time to save her, if you hurry. But I'm afraid you'll have to go through me first. It's time we had it out, old boy. Can't, have you cramping my style, don't y'know.”

Nate ground his teeth and eyed the railway line. He was sure that Flash could cover the ground faster than Gerald's beast. He could get round and hope to reach the tracks before Gerald caught up … but it would mean running from that huge thing, turning his back on it. He had no idea what it could do, but he knew Gerald was counting on this; using Tatty to break his focus, to distract him from the fight.

The leviathan still had a consciousness of sorts—Nate could feel it, just beyond his reach, and he knew if he reached out further with his mind, he might be able to touch it … but it would mean opening the door to that sandstorm that raged just beyond his awareness. It was a door he didn't know how to close.

Gerald played a few bars of
She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain
, and then tooted one of the organ pipes like a train's whistle.

Nate let out a snarl and dug his heels into Flash's flanks, launching the velocycle off the hillock and charging down the slope. Gerald began playing something lively by Haydn. As Nate made his first pass, the tentacles whipped out, snatching at him and trying to knock him from his mount. He dodged through them, Flash banking right and left through the coiling tendrils, avoiding their grasp but failing to get Nate close enough to the platform on which Gerald sat.

Nate scrambled out into rough, open ground and swung Flash's back wheel around, cutting a semi-circular slash through the bog, hearing the engimal give a rumble of satisfaction. Then they hurtled back towards the leviathan. Gerald did not wait for them to come within reach of the tentacles. The rear of the engimal opened out like a flower, diamond-shaped petals overlapping around a round, shallow hollow, complete with a cone-like stamen protruding from the center. Nate stared as the engimal aimed this dish-shaped flower at the sky.

Gerald changed key, his music rising in pitch, and the rain began to lash down harder, soaking the ground. The wind picked up, gusting violently. Nate's heart turned cold as he saw black dots start to coalesce in the air. It was as if someone had sprinkled pepper in the sky. These were intelligent particles, swarming so thickly they were becoming visible. Gerald had found a way to communicate with the particles in the air and in the earth. Wind lashed the rain into Nate's face, blurring his sight as the music went lower. Crevasses split the ground, forcing Flash to leap to one side, then the other, lunging back and forth across the cracks in the earth as they reached out from under the leviathan.

A tentacle slammed down in front of them and Flash vaulted over it, landing solidly and then jumping again, twisting in mid-air as they passed between two more tentacles, one of them scraping Nate's shoulder, the other suffering a skidmark from Flash's back wheel. They landed harder this time, off-balance on the wet slippery ground. Nate felt his revolver fall from his waistband and hauled back on the engimal's horns to spin his mount round before another tentacle crashed down in their path, nearly crushing Flash's head and shoulders. The tentacle went to rise up again, and Nate caught hold of it as it passed over his head. He was yanked from Flash's back, barely holding on to the wet and writhing ceramic surface. But using the movement of the snake-like limb, he swung himself up through the air and over, to drop neatly onto the platform where Gerald sat.

“
Touché
,” Gerald said, working his jaw, all the expression gone from his eyes. “I'm intrigued. How are you defending yourself from the music? How are you protecting Flash?”

“Shove it, Gerald. Let's just get this done.”

Locking gazes with his cousin, Nate was reminded of a reptile, or a shark. Gerald stood up from his chair and Nate lunged at him. Gerald kicked the chair round, jamming the back of it into Nate's stomach, then he struck the side of Nate's jaw with the heel of his right hand. Nate rode the blow, stepped round the chair, blocked a left punch and drove his left elbow into Gerald's sternum. He followed it quickly with a hook into the floating ribs, but Gerald seized the back of his neck and swung his own elbow into the side of Nate's head, knocking him straight to the floor. He pushed himself up, and Gerald kicked him under the chin, flipping him over onto his back. Nate groaned and rolled over to rise to his feet again. His cousin was much stronger, much faster than he remembered.

“It's all about making the most of the particles in your own body,” Gerald told him. “You'd be amazed what I can do now. It's a pity we can't share it.”

Nate didn't reply. He attacked again, jabbing punches and kicks at Gerald, who evaded some, blocked others and replied with fast, vicious strikes of his own. Nate took a punch to the nose and another to his throat and staggered back. Gerald followed, but Nate planted a front kick into his stomach that knocked him towards the edge of the platform.

The leviathan had settled into stillness while they fought. Without Gerald playing music into its lobotomized brain, there were no thoughts passing through its head. Nate threw a desperate look towards the curve in the tracks, where they descended past the edge of the trees, off to the right. From his left, he heard the chuff of a steam engine approaching. The noise only distracted him for an instant, but it was enough for Gerald to spring a knife from his sleeve into his hand and stab Nate in the ribs. Nate only managed to deflect it at the last moment, the blade slitting along his right side, rather than piercing his chest. Gerald came at him again, slashing Nate's arm as he blocked this second strike. The three lamps on the front of the train were visible in the darkness now, coming round the slope of the hill, rain hissing over its barrel-shaped engine, smoke pumping from its smokestack as its pistons drove the steel wheels along the glinting hardness of the rails.

“Tick tock, tick tock,” Gerald taunted him, knife in hand. “Here we are, Nate, on the cusp of a scientific revolution, and you have us thumping each other around the head again.”

“What can I say?” Nate grunted, drawing his hunting knife. “I'm a creature of habit.”

“No, you're a bloody
Neanderthal
!” Gerald snapped.

Hearing a whistle, Nate glanced up at the train that was passing out of sight behind the leviathan's body. Instinctively, he looked for it to come out the other side. He had no time left. Tatty had no time left.

Gerald swept his hand across the keys of the keyboard and a tentacle swung over and down, smashing away part of the platform, even as Nate dived forward to avoid it. He rolled back again to dodge another cut from Gerald's knife and nearly fell off the small organ platform. Forced to drop his knife, he snatched at Gerald's outstretched arm, hauling himself back on, and lunged in, head-butting his cousin on the bridge of the nose. Gerald stumbled backwards, his arms flailing out. Nate grabbed Gerald's right arm and turned him, twisting the arm behind his back. Keeping a firm hold on the arm-lock, he seized his cousin's head, slamming it down hard once, twice, three times on the keyboards, knocking keys loose and forcing discordant blares from the pipes of the organ. The leviathan shuddered and tilted, confused by the signals it was receiving from Gerald. Gerald let out a pained wheeze and slumped down between the seat and the keyboards.

Jumping from the platform, Nate landed heavily on the wet, boggy ground. He had no time left. Whistling for Flash, he set off running towards the rail-way line. The velocycle had been waiting, and now it swept alongside, its engine growling eagerly.

Nate was about to leap onto its back when he heard some strident notes from the organ behind him. Lightning struck the ground between him and Flash, blasting them apart with a blinding pillar of light, hotter than the sun. The strike left a burnt, smoking scar on the earth as Nate ran on, trying to get back to his engimal. More lightning strikes punched the ground around them. The land shook as if in an earthquake, the ground splitting into a wide crevasse in front of him, the soil tearing open like some cavernous mouth. Nate jammed his heels into the ground, skidding gouges into the grass, stopping just inches short of the edge. But Flash could not pull round in time … the engimal pitched head-first into the crevasse, struck the far side and tumbled to the bottom. The crack clamped closed, cutting off the engimal's terrified shriek. Nate's link with Flash's mind was cut off like a light going out.

Nate gasped in shock, as if he had felt the impact himself. Then he looked up at the hundred yards that separated him from the railway line, unable to spot Tatty but seeing the locomotive, tons of iron and steel, rushing headlong towards where his helpless sister lay.

For a moment he was ready to surrender to utter despair. He heard and saw nothing around him, encased in a cocoon of stillness while, in his mind, he felt the sandstorm outside, pressing against the door. With a feeling of release, he let the door open, felt it torn from its hinges and smashed apart as the maelstrom outside rushed in around him and blotted out his thoughts. He staggered, clutching his head as his senses were overwhelmed, connecting suddenly with every living thing around him, with the air and earth and the water that ran through them, the fire in the lightning that threatened to incinerate him.

And among it all, he felt Gerald's monstrous engimal lumbering towards him. It gave him something to focus on, and he lifted his head and opened his eyes. The world was a different place. He could see everything now, from the tiny droplets of water in the clouds to the microscopic organisms in the earth. He could feel the forces that bound together the molecules in the leviathan's giant body.

Gerald was playing Mozart's
Requiem
; deep, brooding, doom-laden music saturating the air as the leviathan loomed over Nate, its tentacles raised to crush him. Nate gazed up at this thing, filling the sky, felt its weight cause the ground to shudder beneath his feet. He thrust his open hand into the air and clenched his fingers into a fist.

The pipes of the organ bent and buckled. With a sound like a choir shown a vision of Hell, the leviathan twisted and writhed as its ceramic hide burst open in a dozen places, its insides churning into a mass of debris, four of its tentacles wrenching loose from its body. Gerald's scream was unheard over the cacophony, as some of his bones broke spontaneously before he fell free of the dying monster.

The leviathan crashed to the wet boggy ground, twitching, its fading groans subsiding deep into its ruined body. The lifeless carcass creaked and ticked like a house settling in the chill of night.

But Nate was already running. The train had passed them by, racing on along the tracks. As he ran, he found his conscious mind struggling to maintain control. He had given away too much. As his mind was suffocated by the storm of sensation, his body could feel the soft ground under his shoes, the whip of the grass across his feet and ankles. The wind across his face and hands. The rain still fell, and it steamed and hissed on his skin. The ancient particles that had surged into awareness inside his body now threatened to take over, powered by primal urges—the human drives that were far more potent than any conscious thought. Gerald had called him a Neanderthal, and it was the primitive man in him that wanted control now. With the adrenaline coursing through his body, he was driven to fight … to hunt and kill.

The train
, Nate's frantic thoughts shouted to be heard.
I
have to reach Tatty! I must stop the train!

But those desperate thoughts were being drowned out, lost in the maelstrom in his head. His body kept running as it reveled in the unearthly power exploding through it. Veins stood out on his neck and arms. His bounds grew longer, his feet leaving gouges in the ground. His thighs bulged, his feet burst from his shoes, his shirt and jacket split down the back as his shoulders hunched and expanded, his arms lengthening, swelling muscles shredding the sleeves. Jagged spikes of bone rose from his spine and shoulder blades.
Tatty!
a distant voice cried from inside him.
Tatty!
As if to overwhelm that desperate appeal, a joyous ape-like roar rose from his lungs. He beat his chest, charged with power, eager to find rivals, prey, lusting for violence.
Tatty!
Nate screamed as he felt himself being buried, crushed under the pressure of the beast's raw, unthinking savagery.