A Quantum Mythology (43 page)

He was less than pleased to see the Monk using an L-tech energy field. He’d gathered up the two tumbler pistols, the spawn blades and the
ACR
s, though he’d had to hack the
ACR
’s control systems before he could use them. He’d also taken his saviour’s trousers and top so he could use the material to grow holsters and pouches for the various weapons and ammunition. Ideally he’d have liked to put on one of the combat armour suits the two guards had been wearing, but he didn’t have time. His saviour had added some armour properties to his clothes, but clearly not enough.

He heard the sound of gunfire. That would be the militia squads destroying their own P-sats. He checked the security footage. He saw the Monk extruding blades from her protective energy field as she destroyed the two S-sats that had attacked her. The only good news about the energy field was that while it could stop bullets, beams and anything else from getting in, it also stopped them from getting out. If she wanted to kill him, she was going to have to do it up close and personal.

‘This might even work,’ he muttered. One thing was for sure – they weren’t going to be so quick to re-create him in the stinking meat of his son’s body again. He sent the command.

The last of the P-sats was taken out with sustained fire from the
ACR
s and thudded to the corridor floor like so much junk. The Monk continued heading towards the airlock.

Almost as one, the militia started screaming. She couldn’t hear it, but she could see their contorted features through the energy field. She assumed Scab had managed to weaponise the various protective nano-screens, but as she couldn’t ’face with the
Templar
she had no way to be sure. There was nothing she could do to help them. The priority was to deal with Benedict/Scab as expeditiously and violently as possible.

She marched around the corner into the corridor Scab was in. He was waiting for her, ACR at the ready. He started firing immediately, one short, controlled burst after another fired so quickly that it was almost a constant stream of fire. The solid-state magazine was eaten away as it provided the ingredients for each bullet. The Monk saw the impacts of the electromagnetically driven armour-piercing explosive rounds as sparks of light from inside the safety of the shield. She kept walking.

Scab started firing the underslung grenade-launcher. The thirty-millimetre high-explosive armour-piercing grenades knocked her back. Impact after impact sent her tumbling down the corridor. Then the explosions relented.

The Monk climbed to her feet. Benedict/Scab was discarding the first ACR and aiming the second. This time he didn’t start with the rifle, just fired the underslung grenade-launcher again and again. Inside the energy field, all the Monk could see was fire as she was battered off the corridor’s walls, floor and ceiling.

Finally the barrage relented. The Monk stood up slowly, her entire body one large, painful bruise. Sparks played all over the energy shield as Benedict/Scab fired burst after burst from the ACR. She started walking through the bullets towards him. He was backing away from her as he fired. She picked up the pace and started to run. She wanted to kill him more than she had ever wanted to kill anyone before. Scab tossed the second ACR and fast-drew the two tumbler pistols, firing them rapidly as he backed away from her. The slower, spinning bullets hit the energy field and were held there for a moment, rotating in the pale yellow aura before dropping to the ground. The pistols ran dry. Scab holstered them and drew the two spawn blades. That was when the Monk realised there was something wrong. Just as she was level with the airlock.

Benedict/Scab was a little surprised it had worked. The external airlock door was already open. All he’d had to do was open the internal one. This was not as easy as it sounded, as one of the key things about spaceships was the requirement that the inside never met the outside, due to the detrimental effect such a meeting would have on biological functions. This made the airlock systems among the most heavily protected on any ship. Getting the
Templar
’s systems to open the external airlock door had been easy enough. Getting it to open the internal door at the same time should have been almost impossible. Except his dead saviour, who apparently had extensive systems access, had already hacked the internal door. All Benedict/Scab needed to do was modify the original hack.

Benedict/Scab expelled all the air from his lungs and closed his eyes,

Too late, the Monk realised what was happening. She caught the red glow in her periphery. There was absolutely nothing she could grab on to as she was sucked out of the corridor. She reached for the lip of the airlock but the energy field surrounding her would not allow any purchase. She just bounced off the edge of the airlock and headed out into Red Space with the other three bodies.

Benedict/Scab was sucked off his feet. He left it as long as he could before ’facing the command to shut the airlock. He hit the floor of the corridor hard. He was next to the airlock. Had it been open another moment he would have joined the Monk in Red Space. The corridor was otherwise empty. He breathed in a lungful of thin air, gratefully. Then he allowed himself to enjoy the cries echoing through the
Templar
’s dark corridors.

When they purchased a copy of his personality, they had been forced to buy an entire Psycho Bank. A secure database containing the personalities of some of the most dangerous, criminally deranged and psychologically compromised individuals in whatever sector of Known Space the Bank had come from. This included, but was not limited to, recreational killers, spree murderers and career assassins. Psycho Banks were set up so that the personalities could be interrogated by governing AIs to provide insight into other cases.

Benedict/Scab found the meat-hack program that allowed him to possess Benedict’s body, and then used that to download the personalities from the Psycho Bank into the neunonics of the
Templar
’s entire crew. As the screams began to die out, he knew the possession process was almost complete. It was easier than it should have been because of his system access, and the fact that the ’face connections between ship and crew were so closely linked.

The energy field would keep her safe from the worst effects of space, and she would live as long as her internal oxygen supply held out. It was depressing watching the
Templar
receding as she spun away from it through the gases of Red Space, though she was still travelling at the same velocity as the ship. She ran through her options. None of them was good.

That little fucker’s done it again.
She sent the destruction command to the energy field. She couldn’t risk Scab salvaging such potent L-tech. The re-engineered copy of an ancient code turned the piece of alien tech into expensive junk. The field came down, but she had already engaged her own suicide solution.

‘Listen to me,’ Scab said. His voice echoed through the ship as he took control of an antiquated PA system. ‘This is Woodbine Scab. Not the spayed weakling bounty killer, not the Legion slave, not the pathetic wannabe who bared his arse to the Consortium for Elitehood. This is the Woodbine Scab who carved out the Kingdom of Bone on Cyst. Do you understand?’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘The ship you are on is a Church light cruiser, one of the most sophisticated warships ever made, and I am in control of it. Now, some of you are bad people, nasty folk who will want to be Daddy on this ship. Well, you can step up or hide and bide your time – the end result will be the same. But if you follow me, I promise you every sick little thing your dark, twisted, shrunken hearts could desire. We have atrocities to commit! Who’s with me?’

He would have to make examples, he knew, but despite his contempt for nearly everyone else in Known Space, the answering cheers were strangely gratifying.

Every surface in the empty swimming pool area that had once been the
Basilisk II
’s lounge had been turned into a screen. Scab was standing among the various media feeds, bathed in the red flames from the various fires on the habitat the
Templar
had raided. He was trembling with rage.

‘It’s very simple,’ Benedict/Scab said. ‘If the
Templar
appears, you will give us exactly what we want, or you and everyone you know will suffer until you’re all ultimately destroyed. There will be no coming back, I promise.’ Benedict/Scab had made the promise to Known Space against a backdrop of snuff/torture immersions and mutilated bodies bonded to the habitat’s smart-matter windows. In the wake of the attack there had been mass outcry against the Church for letting Benedict/Scab get hold of such a sophisticated warship. The Church had in turn promised to dispatch a significant part of its fleet to find and destroy the
Templar
.

Vic was keeping well back from Scab. He wanted to leave the pool area but was too frightened to move.

‘We can either go after him, or we can continue on the path we’ve already started on,’ Elodie told him.

Scab looked over at her. The feline actually took a step back.

‘This.’ It came out as a slow hiss. ‘Has to be answered.’

In the Cathedral, the Monk opened her eyes. He first thought was fury at Scab successfully murdering her again.

30

Ancient Britain

Britha wasn’t sure why she’d done it. Shaved off half her hair. She was sitting on one of the wooden platforms sticking out from the fort on the Mother Hill, looking down the valley. She’d been sitting there for so long that her presence had stopped bothering the crows and the ravens picking over the bones of the dead.

She felt dirty.
As well I should
, she admonished herself. After she’d sheared off the hair, she had collected it to burn so nobody else could use it to gain power over her.

Her woad tattoo of a Z-shaped broken spear with a serpent entwined around it wasn’t blue any more. The molten, living red gold she had chosen to drink had pushed through the surface of her skin. It had taken the form of her tattoo and crept over her body, forming disconcerting patterns.

She could hear the whispering constantly – from her dirk, from her spear, from her flesh – but she was pretty sure she was under her own control because of how disgusted she felt with herself. Her robes were black now, like those of the feared sacrificers who performed the tasks the other
dryw
balked at. She had worn masks as a
dryw
. The shy maiden when it was time for the sex rituals, the stern mother of the tribe, the fearsome hag when war threatened. This was another mask she would have to wear.

Her people were gone, so there was nobody to serve now. This had to become about her child. She couldn’t fail the child like she had the people of Ardestie.

Below, on one of the smaller hills to which the Mother Hill had given birth, the Lochlannach were preparing their mounts.

‘Are you ready?’ Bress asked softly from behind her. Britha glanced back at him. He looked beautiful, Otherworldly. His leather armour had been moulded to fit his body. His sword was sheathed at his waist, its blade too long to have been forged from mortal metal. His fur-lined cloak fluttered in the wind, its hood up to cover his long silvery blond hair. She wondered if this was how she would look to mortals now. Had the demons in her blood cast a glamour on her human form to make her look prettier? To add to their sense of awe when they met her?

‘Am I ready to hunt someone I fought beside, someone I lay beside?’ Britha asked.

‘If he brought you both here, then he knows the way back to the
Ubh Blaosc
, to your child. He must also have a rod – to your eyes it would look to be made of copper or bronze.’

If Fachtna had this rod on him she had not seen it, but she had been badly injured.

‘And that is what we go to take from him?’ Britha asked quietly. ‘He fought beside me, at the wicker man.’

‘I know. I killed him,’ Bress said.

Britha didn’t look back again. ‘We fought against your evil,’ she added. Bress did not reply. ‘It was the right thing to do, but I did evil to accomplish it.’ The silence stretched out. ‘Do you come from a place like the
Ubh Blaosc
?’

‘No,’ Bress said.

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Cythrawl,’ he told her. It was an old word for hell. This time she turned to look back at him, searching for a lie, searching for warrior bravado. She found neither. That was the thing about Bress: his heart might be black as pitch, he might be capable of the most awful things, but she didn’t think he lied much.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, meaning it, and feeling lost. ‘I want you, and I will do what I must to get my baby back. I will wear the mask for you, not for your master—’

‘I …’ Bress started.

‘Quiet,’ she told him. It was one of her old voices, one she had learned among ancient oak trees, their bark coated with long-dried blood. Cythrawl or not, Bress respected her enough to remain quiet. ‘I will be your terror, for you. I will be like you, but that’ – she pointed down to where she knew the entry to the cave was – ‘is a thing which should not be.’

‘I helped murder your future,’ he said, and there was something pathetic in his voice that she had not heard before.

They rode south through the cliff-edged hills, past farms, settlements and small villages, all burned out. Their people had been harvested for their bones to build the obscene tower far beneath the hills. Britha, like Bress and the rest of the Lochlannach, rode in silence. It was a cold, wet morning when they started out and mist shrouded the land. She realised she had become one of the things people feared in the mist. She was one of the things that made people spit to avert evil.

Bress’s eyes were closed as he concentrated. Britha had the disconcerting feeling that he was looking through the eyes of one of the Lochlannach he had sent ahead to scout. The sky remained cloudy, but the worst of the mist was gone now. The day had been interspersed with heavy showers, though none of them had lasted long, and somehow her robe still wasn’t soaked through. They had been riding, more slowly now, along a track next to a river in a narrow cliff-lined valley. They stopped on the track and Bress had ordered them into the woods, though the trees were providing little in the way of cover for their large white horses and more than a dozen fully armoured warriors.

‘Well?’ Britha asked.

‘Many warriors, easily in the hundreds, and they are escorting a column of landsfolk in their thousands.’

‘They will be fleeing the Muileartach’s children,’ Britha said.

‘And they will come upon us soon.’

‘You don’t mean to fight them?’ Britha asked incredulously. ‘Not even your Lochlannach could fight that many.’ Then she thought about it and knew that wasn’t true. Bress’s expression hadn’t changed. ‘You can’t – the slaughter would be appalling.’

‘They are in my way and they are no friends of ours.’

‘Because you raided their villages, killed their families, enslaved the rest and tried to sacrifice them!’

‘All true, but none of it matters.’

‘We could go around the valley rather than through it.’

‘That would put many days on the journey. Each day we waste means that we will have to ride further into the changed land of the Muileartach’s spawn, and they will be able to hurt us. We will ride through them, and keep riding. We will kill as few as possible.’

‘All to make sure you kill as many people of this island as you possibly can!’ Britha spat.

‘I’ve just said—’

‘This isn’t ruthlessness, this is the red pleasure in taking lives, in hurting others, in spreading pain. You’re no different from that … that sick thing back in the cave!’

For a moment, Britha thought she had pushed him too far, and she saw his face harden.

‘I take no pleasure in it. I just don’t care,’ he told her.

‘There has to be another way,’ she said evenly.

‘Those are nothing but words.
Find
me another way.’

They had been keeping pace with her in the woods for some time now. They were good. At first Britha thought that an animal, perhaps a lynx, was stalking her, as she had caught sight of something with fur moving in the trees. Quickly she realised it was scouts moving ahead of the huge column of warriors and landsfolk they were approaching.

She rode down the muddy track, her spear pointed down to show that she came with peaceful intent. That and her robes, which marked her as
dryw
, should be enough to keep her safe.
Initially, at least
, she thought.

She did not recognise the tribe of the warriors who met her on the track. They all favoured long, intricately braided moustaches but eschewed beards. They carried longspears and shields, with sword and daggers at their hips, as Britha would expect. Casting spears had been driven into the earth close to where the warriors stood. A number of them had skulls they had taken hanging from their belts. A few wore mail, but most had armour made of plates of boiled leather. They looked tired, and travel-worn, but they were alert. Most of them were scarred in some way, and many were missing fingers. Britha knew that these were real warriors, not pretenders. She also knew they were on edge.

Beyond them she could see the refugee camp, which spread up the hillside on both sides of the track and out of the valley. It was odd that they were not moving if they sought to escape the children of Muileartach.

‘Are you come from them?’ one of the warriors demanded. He was a big man, his face a scarred and mangled mess, which suggested that either he was not a particularly good warrior, or he had been around for a long time. Judging by the skulls hanging from his belt, Britha suspected the latter.

‘Who?’ Britha asked.

‘The spirits from the forest,’ another warrior answered, this one younger.

‘I come from a place where warriors are not too afraid to introduce themselves before they question strangers. I am Britha,
ban draoi
to the Cirig, a people who come from far to the North.’

‘What do you want—’ the younger man started, but the scarred warrior cuffed him around the back of the head.

‘I am Borth, whom they call the Tall, Borth of a Hundred Battles, the Head-Harvester, the Child of the Red Man,’ the scarred man said. ‘And you have my apologies for my rudeness. You may claim what you want of me, and I will of course submit to any judgement you make.’

‘That will not be necessary,’ Britha replied. ‘It is easy to forget your manners when times are hard, and enemies are at your front and back.’

‘Aye, true enough,’ Borth said, nodding. ‘Will you eat and sup with us? As you see, we have many under our care, but what we have is yours.’ It was a formal offer of hospitality.

‘Now I must be rude, I am afraid,’ Britha told him. She saw a frown appear on the warrior’s scarred visage. ‘I feel that to accept your offer of hospitality, well made though it is, would be to do you a disservice and mislead you.’

Borth remained silent for a moment as he thought on her words. Then he turned to the younger warrior he’d cuffed and nodded towards the camp. The young man loped off in that direction.

‘Speak plainly,’ Borth said, turning back to Britha.

‘I come on behalf of the Lochlannach and their warleader Bress,’ she told them.

Borth was shaking his head. ‘You speak as though I should know who this is.’

‘The raiders in the black
curraghs
.’

That got their attention. There was the sound of sharp iron sliding out of leather. Others readied their longspears or picked up casting spears. Borth held his hand up to stop them from attacking.

‘Those are sour words indeed, as they are no friends to any here.’ His tone was cold now. ‘They harvested great suffering among our people.’

‘Let me kill her,’ one of the other warriors said, a short, squat, powerfully built woman almost as badly scarred as Borth.

Britha faced her. ‘I am still a
dryw
, and you will respect that unless you would see your line cursed,’ Britha told her in the voice that brooked no argument.

‘What line?’ the woman spat, taking a step towards Britha. ‘Those you didn’t kill you took away in your
curraghs
to sacrifice to your god who is a sickness, so I hear it.’

‘Enough, Eithne,’ Borth said quietly. He appeared to command enough respect among his warriors that the woman lapsed into an uneasy brooding silence and settled for just glaring at Britha. ‘You have come with your spear down, so we will listen,’ Borth told her. ‘What would you have of us?’

‘Yes, what would you have of us?’ another voice asked. Five figures were making their way down the trail. The one who had spoken wore a dark robe not unlike hers, except the shape suggested that it covered armour, which was very unusual for a
dryw
, and he looked to be well built beneath it. A hood covered his features, a sword hung from his hip – also unusual for a
dryw
– and he carried a staff.

With him was a large warrior with an equally large belly, clad in mail with a black cloak, thick beard and long, black hair shot through with white. One of his eyes was milky and clearly blind.

There was a wiry-looking boy of about ten or twelve. Something in the boy’s movement and his guarded expression reminded Britha of a wild animal.

A woman who looked old enough to have seen forty summers accompanied the boy. Her emaciated frame and the rags barely covering it told of her recent trials, but she still carried herself with strength and dignity.

The fifth person with the group was Germelqart.

She felt a warmth spreading through her at the sight of the Carthaginian navigator who, along with Kush and Tangwen, had saved her from Ettin. Then she saw his expression: guarded suspicion, bordering on fear.

She was also aware of quiet, careful movement in the woods at her back but resisted the urge to turn and look. She assumed it was the scouts who had kept pace with her, preparing to act in case she tried something.

‘Why do you hide your face?’ Britha demanded of the black-robed, armoured man as the five figures stopped by Borth. The other warriors had made way for them. The man reached up and pushed his hood down. He had a long beard and moustache, both intricately braided, and his head was shorn of hair.

‘To keep the rain from my head. I am Bladud, who some call the Witch King. This is Nerthach, my strong right arm. This is Anharad of the Trinovantes and her grandson Mabon.’ The boy was now glaring at Britha with hatred. ‘And—’

‘And Germelqart, the Carthaginian,’ Britha finished for the Witch King. ‘I am glad to see you well.’

The navigator inclined his head slightly but remained quiet. She felt like he was studying her.

‘She is with the raiders,’ Borth told them.

Britha noticed that Mabon was still moving towards her. She was worried he would do something stupid and force her to hurt or kill him. The woman was also glaring at her with undisguised hatred. She looked familiar to Britha but she couldn’t place her.

‘Indeed,’ Bladud said. There was no hint of hostility in his voice, though she noticed Nerthach’s hand was resting on the pommel of his sheathed sword. ‘And what would they have of us?’

‘I beg your forgiveness, but I must ask Germelqart something.’ She turned to face the navigator. ‘What of Kush and Tangwen?’ She could see the conflict written all over the quiet man’s face.