Conflagration (37 page)

Raphael turned aggressively. “As a matter of fact we do. You have a problem with that, Sir Palmer?”

Windermere moved in quickly as Palmer began to redden. “Did Cordelia say anything else?”

Again Jesamine hesitated, looking to Raphael and Argo for some kind of support or council. “I’m not sure if I should say.”

Argo shrugged. “We’ve just been lecturing these Norse folk about holding back information. I don’t see how we can keep anything to ourselves now.”

“The Zhaithan’s brain blew out when he started to talk about the White Twins.”

Argo groaned. “Damn it to hell.”

“Why?”

“Because it moves Jeakqual-Ahrach way up on the list of suspects, even before we have a list of suspects.”

Windermere looked surprised. “Wasn’t she always?”

“Yeah, but, up to now it all seemed a bit terrestrial for her.”

Sir Harry Palmer was looking mystified. “Would someone mind telling me who or what the White Twins are?”

Windermere signaled for a fresh round of drinks. “You have copies of a number of reports in your files. I believe you marked them “paranormal irrelevancy.”

All eyes turned to Sir Harry until the waiter arrived as a much-needed distraction. Argo reached for his fresh beer. “We need Slide. What the hell is he doing in Oslo?”

Windermere looked uncomfortable. “He’s no longer in Oslo. His last message said he was leaving for Muscovy. He did, however, send you all a telegram.”

He reached in his pocket and produced a folded sheet of coarse buff paper which he handed to Argo. Argo smoothed it flat and read silently.

YS to 4 ++ Jack Kennedy has been assassinated in a thousand interlocking dimensions ++ Stop ++ He never escapes ++ Stop ++ If there is a goddess, she created these variable dimensions to drive us crazy ++ Don’t grieve ++ Stop ++ Act ++ Stop ++ Courage ++ Stop ++ Slide

For an instant, Argo remembered a conversation with Slide, by a campfire, in what seemed like a different time, when they had first been on the run with the Rangers. As Slide had smoked and talked, Argo had assembled a vision of Slide as this dogged and relentless nonhuman desperado, fated to wander from dimension to dimension, and from reality to reality, waging a dark and personal war on the various incarnations of Hassan IX. Argo realized that he had always trusted Slide to turn up when he was needed. He still did. But the moment was both crucial and desperate, and this led Argo to the unpleasant conclusion that Slide was elsewhere because The Four were supposed to fly this one solo. But did Slide know that Cordelia was missing? That there might not be a Four? As time passed, and no word came from Cordelia, the assumption grew stronger that something had happened to her. It was some hours now since the assassination, and Cordelia must have heard what had happened, but she had not made contact. Slide was, usually and magickally, well aware of everything they did, and he had still not chosen to appear. Argo passed the note to Raphael, who read it and then gave it to Jesamine. She read the message in disbelief, and choked back a sob. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Argo took a deep breath. “It means the crucial word is “act.” It means, before we do anything else, we have to find Cordelia.”

CORDELIA

She had sat in the corner of the big black automobile, and burst into multipurpose tears. If Sera Falconetti was to be believed, Jack Kennedy was dead, and she was looking at a highly dubious future. All through her sobs Falconetti had made no move and said nothing. She simply allowed Cordelia to cry out her shock, and only spoke after Cordelia had been sitting upright for a while, staring silently at the night world passing by outside the car. “Are you okay now?”

Cordelia nodded. “Yes. I’m okay.”

On Cordelia’s side of the car, the edge of the road was lined with evenly spaced tree stumps, perhaps poplars, like the pictures she had seen in schoolbooks when she was a child, but now hacked down almost level to the ground. They were motoring fast across flat country, headlamps cutting through the blackness, and with almost no traffic to impede them, except an occasional wagon being dragged by a bony mule, or some beat-up rattletrap of a steamer. She noticed that, here and there, small knots of ragged men and women, and even a scattering of children, walked slowly and resignedly along the side of the road, as though there was a permanently drifting strata of homeless among the Franks. She glanced at Falconetti who could only shrug. “Migrant workers looking for the next job. The Empire has no economy.”

“And what are those?”

By far the bulk of the traffic on the long and very straight road was made up of heavy and slow-moving tanker trucks, lumbering in both directions under wheezing steam-power, with the code IPP FK90 painted in large letters on their sides, and, once she was over her emotional venting, Cordelia pointed out the next one to pass. Falconetti smiled wryly. “Slop tankers.”

“What are slop tankers?”

“You really haven’t been in the Empire before, have you?”

“Only occupied Virginia, when it was still occupied.”

“The tankers are going to and from the big Boulogne slop plant, officially known as Imperial Processing Plant FK90.”

“And what’s slop?”

“An idea thought up by the Mosul’s Teuton allies to both feed the masses and humiliate the Franks. You must have noticed the stench of fish when you came into Boulogne.”

“It was hard to miss.”

“Well, the fish, along with all kinds of other stuff—offal, waste protein, roots, spoiled grain, and, according to rumor, dead dogs and the odd human corpse—are fed into this huge grinder, boiled, and pounded until you have an unpleasant goo that is then dried or cooked into the various colors, flavors, and grades of meat substitute that is issued to the general population as part of their subsistence ration.”

“It sounds disgusting.”

“Imagine how the Franks feel with their long history of cuisine.” Falconetti broke off and stared ahead. “Best have your wits about you, we’re coming up to a checkpoint.”

Cordelia was suddenly alarmed. “A checkpoint? You mean Zhaithan?”

“Just Mosul regular army, and maybe a Ministry of Virtue agent. In this car, we should have no trouble.”

Cordelia peered up the road ahead, and saw two military vehicles, light armored cars, pulled across the road, their presence dramatically marked by guttering flares and red oil lamps. All traffic was forced to halt and subject itself to inspection by the group of armed and uniformed soldiers who stood beside the machines. Cordelia might have viewed this roadblock as a cause for panic, but Falconetti seemed perfectly calm, so she waited to see what would happen next. The car’s driver glanced back, and Falconetti nodded. He slowed the car as they approached the improvised barrier. A Teuton underofficer and two privates walked up to the car. Their carbines were slung over their shoulders and they showed no sign that they anticipated any sort of trouble.

“I don’t have time to explain, but look abject. Like a totally intimidated prisoner.”

Cordelia did as she was told and sank into her corner of the car, hunching her shoulders in a suitably cowed posture. The driver rolled down his window and talked to the soldier in a voice that was too low for Cordelia to hear. After a short conversation, the driver reached into a dashboard compartment, and handed the underofficer a file of papers. The underofficer inspected them, and his attitude noticeably changed. His heels came together and his spine straightened, until he was at de facto attention. The driver took back the papers, had another brief conversation with the underofficer and then rolled up the window, winking quickly at Falconetti. The car was waved through, and the soldiers manning the roadblock turned their attention to the next vehicle in line, an IPP FK90 slop tanker. When they were under way again, Cordelia straightened in her seat and looked at Sera Falconetti with a combination of admiration and curiosity. “How did you manage that? What was in those papers?”

“Jacques told the underofficer that we were on a special mission for Her Grand Eminence, and that the papers were letters of transit, personally signed by her, guaranteeing us the right to travel unhindered anywhere in the Empire.”

Signed by Jeakqual-Ahrach? You told me you were not an agent of Her Grand Eminence or the Zhaithan. Those were your exact words.”

Falconetti laughed. “And I’m not.”

“But the papers…”

“Don’t get paranoid, girl. The papers are forgeries, but coupled with the size and magnificence of the car, they are enough to impress any mere underofficer well beyond any thought of questioning them. Do you really think some noncom manning a roadblock in the middle of nowhere, who’s never so much as seen a letter of transit signed by Jeakqual-Ahrach, is going to risk delaying us while he attempts to check via Mosul communications that refuse to work half the time?”

“It’s starting to seem as though everything here runs on bluff or corruption, or it simply doesn’t run at all.”

“Bluff and corruption are two of our most effective weapons. Although don’t be under any illusion. Jacques and Luc were ready and able to shoot our way through the roadblock if the need arose. Never underestimate the value of lethal force when all else fails.” Falconetti produced a flask from a compartment of the car’s seat arm. She took a sip and offered it to Cordelia. “Cognac?”

“Please.”

“In reality the forgery was a damned good one, hand lettered on the right kind of parchment by a real artist. He even put a pinch of the paranormal on it; magicked the signature so it wavers and undulates when it’s looked at closely. I couldn’t imagine any bastard below the rank of colonel, in any of the Frankish Occupied Territories, having the balls to question it.”

Cordelia was not only encouraged by Falconetti’s confidence, but by the way she accepted the paranormal as part of life. It was refreshing after all those she had met who were so reluctant to face that it even existed. The big black car was once again racing through the night, almost alone on the open highway, and had it not been for the awful condition of the road surface that even bounced the Benz’s luxurious suspension, Cordelia might have slept behind a haze of exhaustion and brandy. She was hardly able to think any longer and certainly did not want to talk. For a while her head whirled. Jack Kennedy, who had always been there, was suddenly gone. She would never see him again. Back in London, Jesamine must have been beside herself with grief. And her own state was no better, roaring through the night with plainly powerful strangers who she neither understood, nor trusted. Fortunately Falconetti was not turning out to be the kind who insisted on making conversation, and, for long periods, was quite as content as Cordelia to stare silently into the night as it wafted past the car. Thus Cordelia had time to wrestle down her fears until her mind was a melancholy blank, and she had been quite prepared to stay that way, except that the blue-white glow had showed on the horizon, like a strangely compacted false dawn, and Cordelia spoke for the first time in what seemed to have been hours. “Is that a city? Is that Paris?”

Falconetti shook her head. “No, that’s no city, and it’s certainly not Paris. That’s our detour.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Just be patient, Cordelia. You’ll see for yourself soon enough.”

They continued down the road for a few more minutes, and then Jacques and Falconetti exchanged glances. A turning was coming up on the right and Jacques slowed and spun the steering wheel. The ride was now really bumpy, over a scarcely paved country back road. They also seemed to be ascending a low wooded rise, and, all the time, moving closer to the unexplained luminescence. The car moved through trees, and Jacques cut the headlights, easing forward very carefully. Falconetti reached into a door pocket and produced a pair of shiny steel handcuffs, and indicated that Cordelia should take them. “It’s highly unlikely that we’ll be stopped again, but, if we do run into a patrol, they may check us out somewhat more carefully than they did at that routine roadblock. We are now in a highly restricted area, and it will be hard to talk our way out, no matter how flashy our letter of transit may look. It would be best if you put these on. It will make the story that you are our prisoner a great deal more plausible.”

Cordelia took the cuffs, but simply held them with an expression of doubt and unwillingness. “Do I have to?”

Falconetti’s face hardened. “It’s not negotiable.”

With a reluctant trepidation, Cordelia clipped the manacles loosely onto her wrists. The blacked-out car crested the rise and Cordelia could finally see the source of the illumination. Falconetti, Cordelia, and the two men stepped down from the automobile and stood looking. A vast expanse of the flat land below them was lit up by row after row of electrical floodlights. Two huge objects dominated the area, and Cordelia recognized both of them from schoolroom picture books. The perfectly equilateral Amiens Pyramid was so much larger than she had ever imagined it. The mighty earthwork reared into the night so its apex was just a dark shape against the sky, beyond the uppermost reach of the floodlights. The story of the Amiens Pyramid was known all over the world; how it marked the battlefield on which the Frankish Grand Army had been defeated by the Mosul, beaten into surrender by human wave after human wave, and then, after two days of unrelenting combat, the survivors had been systematically slaughtered until not a man, woman, boy, or horse had been left alive. Some estimates put the numbers of the dead on both sides as high as a quarter of a million, and they had all been buried together, Mosul and Frank alike, piled side by side, layer after layer, in a single huge pit. The story was that the pyramid had been shaped from the earth that had been excavated to create the vast mass grave, but it scarcely seemed possible. Looking up at the towering monument to war and death, Cordelia could only think that more dirt must have been added. Even the most gigantic grave could hardly have produced such a vast tonnage of building material.

On the far side of the pyramid stood the Paris Gun, the monstrous field piece, the crowning achievement of the Aschenbach Foundries in the Ruhr, with its twenty-four-inch barrel, the massive system of pistons that raised and lowered its elevation and absorbed its fearsome recoil, and the immense gun carriage that ran on steel wheels taller than a man, and double sets of railroad tracks. Again, the thing itself was much bigger than any picture had led her to believe. All those years ago, before Cordelia had even been born, it had fired on Paris for four ceaseless days and nights, raining down shells containing high explosives, poisoned gas, and incendiaries on the helpless population, until there was nothing left of the ancient city. The Paris Gun had, in fact, launched its barrage from a firing position some miles to the east, but, after the fall of the Franks, it had been hauled on specially laid tracks to its present position beside the Amiens Pyramid, as permanent monument to superior Mosul cruelty, and as a perpetual reminder of Frankish humiliation.