Conflagration (53 page)

“Right.”

“What did he have to say?”

Raphael snapped back to the task at hand. “Perdu needs all the manpower he can get to move the gun, and he needs rope.”

Slide nodded. “I’m on it.”

He was already shouting and waving to Falconetti. “We need to start wrangling those slaves to the gun. Perdu wants it moved.”

CORDELIA

The armored car was of a type that Cordelia had never seen before, low with wide, fat heavy tires, and a narrow slit for a windshield. Its reinforced sides were painted a dull slate-gray, without sign or insignia. The machine looked powerful, but it was traveling much more slowly than Cordelia would have expected, and swerving from side to side as though the driver were drunk or incapacitated.

“If it doesn’t stop, it’s going to wreck my Benz.” Sera, who had been standing with Cordelia by the Benz, started to back away, but Cordelia waved her back.

“Help me move Lime, she may be a traitorous bitch, but even she doesn’t deserve to go under the wheels. Also we may need her again.”

Jesamine also moved to help. She and Sera took Lime’s trembling arms, Cordelia took her legs, and they half carried, half dragged her residually twitching form to the side of the road. Madden looked quickly round. “You need help?”

Cordelia shook her head. “Deploy the men. We have no idea what to expect from this thing.”

Madden and Jacques spread the gunmen into a half circle. Although some still wore enemy uniforms, no deception was intended. They were simply ready to shoot down anything that might emerge from any of the doors of the armored car. Cordelia watched as the car began to slow. At least it was not going to try to smash its way through the roadblock, which would thwart all plans so far formulated, but whoever was driving it still did not seem in anything like total control. The armored car was slowing, but not enough to bring it to a stop before it reached the Benz. It rolled for the final few feet, before nosing into Sera’s automobile, hard enough to leave a dent in the previously immaculate paneling before finally halting.

For long, anticlimactic seconds, absolutely nothing happened. No sound came from the armored car except the idling engine, and no doors opened. Madden looked at Cordelia, who could only shrug. She had no better idea of what to do next than he did. Then Harriet Lime jerked and the voice of the Twins spoke through her.

“We can’t get out.”

“We can’t open the door and we can’t get out.”

Madden approached the armored car, shotgun leveled, ready for anything. “Want me to try the door?”

Cordelia nodded. “But be very, very careful. This really could be a trap.”

Gingerly, Madden advanced on what he assumed was the driver’s side door. Jacques and another gunman covered him from a few paces back. What passed for a window was only another narrow slit, so there was no way to see in, but a functional-looking lever looked like an exterior door handle. Shifting his shotgun to one hand, he tentatively gripped the handle. “I sure as shit hope this isn’t wired to a bomb. It would be an embarrassing way to go out.” He eased it down a tad, half expecting it to be locked or otherwise secured. “Of course, if it is booby trapped, we won’t know a fucking thing about it.”

The handle yielded to pressure, and Madden tossed caution to the winds and pushed it all the way down, but then leaped back like a cat as the door swung open, and a corpse in a blood-soaked Zhaithan tunic toppled out and flopped on the road, adding more blood to what was already there. Satisfied that the corpse was dead, Madden paid it no more mind. Tersely gesturing for his backup to move into second position, and protecting himself with training and long experience, Madden pushed his shotgun in the open door, before peering inside. “Holy fuck!”

Madden withdrew from the car and took a step back. “I think you better come and look at all this, Lady Blakeney.”

Cordelia did as he asked without question. Madden pointed to the corpse on the ground. “You ever seen anything like that? It’s as though the inside of his head exploded.”

Cordelia had, of course, seen something exactly like it, but that wasn’t the moment to admit it. She had seen the corpse of Borat Omar, the night after Newbury Vale, after she and Slide had interrogated him, and his head had also exploded. The same fluid still seeped from the mouth and ears, and drained from the hollows where the eyes had once been.

“There’s four more like that inside. They make quite a stench.”

“And the Twins?”

Madden took another step back, and indicated the door, as though making an introduction. First the girl and then the boy scrambled from inside the armored car. The White Twins moved like infants, unsteady and unsure, but, at the same time, totally self-possessed. The early morning light tended to lend an air of unreality, and they looked just like the image that Jeakqual-Ahrach had conjured on the stern of the
Ragnar
in the middle of the Northern Ocean; a white-faced boy and an equally pallid girl, intense three-year-olds, identical, and possibly albino, with fine, doll-like hair, those huge, unnerving eyes, and pointed, porcelain teeth. When Cordelia had seen them in the vision, their tiny Zhaithan cowls had been black. Now, on the road near Amiens, they would have been white, except the fabric was splashed with blood like butchers’ aprons. They first inspected the dead driver, and then they raised their damp, pale blue eyes to Cordelia. On the
Ragnar,
they had radiated a malign hatred, but this had been replaced by sinister trust.

“They wouldn’t let us out.”

“They wouldn’t let us out. So we made their head’s go goopy.”

Cordelia took a step back and whispered under her breath. “So it’s you that do the sophisticated mindfuck.”

Cordelia sensed Sera beside her even before she whispered. “What’s the sophisticated mindfuck?”

“It’s a term that Slide once used for what we see here.”

“Please take us away from here.”

“Please take us away from here.”

The Twins were now staring intently at Cordelia, but she was still able to sense the gun in Sera’s hand, and how she was imperceptibly raising it. She dropped a fast hand to Sera’s wrist. “Think of daisies and butterflies, something nice, and very quickly. They may be able to read your intentions.”

“We have to…”

“No, we don’t. I gave them my word and I intend to keep it.” She glanced down at the corpse on the road. “If for no other reason than I don’t want to end up like him.”

“So what are you going to do?”

Before Cordelia could answer, Harriet Lime had risen to her feet. She moved like a zombie, trembling, and apparently attempting to speak. The Twins heads snapped round faster than Madden could raise his shotgun.
“Mother!”

Lime’s lips moved, but the voice was that of Jeakqual-Ahrach.
“I do not suffer deceit gladly, or accept betrayal as pragmatism.”

Madden was fast, but the Twins were faster. His shotgun blast struck Harriet Lime in the chest, but blood and brains were already gushing from her eyes. All three, though, were too late. The voice and power of Jeakqual-Ahrach was already in Cordelia’s head.”

“I DO NOT SUFFER DECEIT GLADLY!”

ARGO

“On the count of three…”

Every man or woman who wasn’t directly engaging the Mosul had streamed across the construction site, a ragtag horde, ready to move the Great Paris Gun. Some had come willingly and others had been threatened at gunpoint. Some saw the destruction of the gun as an act of historic revenge, others were only there because the whips of the labor camp overseers, who Falconetti had bribed or threatened to the cause, were at their backs. Ropes had been found and ropes had been brought, and they had been attached to every part of the gun carriage, first by Perdu’s crew, and then by increasing numbers of willing hands. Human muscle wasn’t the only power being put to use. A half dozen cars and trucks had been secured to the Paris Gun, and their motors and traction would also be employed to overcome the huge artillery piece’s monstrous inertia. When all the ropes were in place, Argo could imagine how, from the air, it must look like some giant spider had attached its web to the lower areas of the gun.

“One, two, three … now heave!”

The explosives were packed inside the barrel, and Calq and Riffi were riding the muzzle, putting the finishing touches to the cement plug. All else was ready. The gun just had to move. No one wanted to believe that they had come so far, and done so much, only to be defeated by the leviathan’s incalculable weight. Calq and Riffi paused as the massed horde prepared to take the strain, looking anxiously down at the men who levered with wooden planks, struggling to turn the immense steel wheels. A mass groan went up, ropes stretched, overseers yelled curses, muscles strained, engines howled, wheels spun in the dirt, feet scrabbled to find purchase, but the gun did not move. It remained motionless in the face of all the concerted effort. A tow chain snapped, and one of the trucks that had brought them from Paris jumped forward, out of control, until its driver was able to brake. Men straightened and looked round. Even with so many of them, the gun remained immobile.

Old Temps climbed up on the gun carriage. “Okay, let’s try it again. One, two, three … heave!”

Some sporadic firing continued around the slave laborers’ compound. A squad of Zhaithan had holed up in one of the empty huts, and seemed prepared to shoot it out with the Parisians until the bitter end, but, for the most part, the battle was over. It might be said that the small army from Paris had won the day, but, if the Paris Gun could not be brought to the pyramid, and all the strange new modifications destroyed, no victory could be claimed. Men and women squared their shoulders, spat on their hands and, on Perdu’s command, tried again. They grunted and strained, and for a moment, they almost felt an illusion of the gun moving, but it didn’t.

Old Temps was shouting, refusing to give up. “Third time! Third time! Don’t give up! One, two, three … heave!”

Argo closed his eyes and pulled. A man near him was chanting. “Come on, come on, come on.”

Another was rhythmically grunting. “Move you bastard. Move you bastard.”

And just as defeat seemed inevitable, a loud clank was followed by an extended metallic groan, and the bastard moved. The Paris Gun gave up its inertia and lurched forward. Some had been leaning so hard into the ropes that they fell when the gun moved. It seemed to take on a life of its own and started gathering speed. Workers and gunmen were running, pulling, cheering, more fell over as they tried to keep up. The gun was rolling straight at the pyramid and would only stop when it plowed into the dirt at its base, and Old Temps Perdu would test his theories of demolition physics.

Argo was hauling and cheering, just like all those around him, but then a terrible voice invaded his head, blotting out everything.

“I DO NOT SUFFER DECEIT GLADLY!”

THE FOUR

“I DO NOT SUFFER DECEIT GLADLY!”

The Four found themselves facing Jeakqual-Ahrach in a place of Jeakqual-Ahrach’s creating: a towering peak of black volcanic rock somewhere in a vision of hell, above the inevitable fires of Ignir and Aksura burning below like the lava seas of some primeval planet. The Four had been spread out on the earthly battlefield, but now they were grouped together in this sulphurous place over which Jeakqual-Ahrach, with a crown of blood-gold roses, presided from a diamond throne that shimmered with rainbows of refraction that cut like razor-edged, infinite swords, and slashed through what remained of The Four’s power as it was wafted from them by foul and ripping winds that cried with the moans of a million heretics. The Four were trained in the combat space of the Other Place, but this was something else. Everywhere they looked, they were inside a total construct of their archenemy.

“Did you really think you could negate all my efforts and bring me low while I was in the Sleep of Youth?”

The Four did not believe an answer was required. Mothmen rolled in distant turbulence and batwing things rode the high currents of the enclosing vortex. The manifestations of Jeakqual-Ahrach’s towering rage were all-encompassing and wholly inventive. The Four were clearly intended to marvel and become awed before they finally suffered whatever fate she intended should befall them.

“You think you turned my children against me, but did you ask yourselves how long they would remain turned?”

The Four did not believe an answer was required to that question either, but seemingly the White Twins did. Out of nowhere, they appeared in a pool of pure light between Jeakqual-Ahrach and The Four, and the blades of the diamond throne could not penetrate the bright aura around them.

“We have turned against you, mother.”

“We have turned against you, mother, because you meant to hurt us.”

“We have turned against you, mother, because you meant to kill us.”

Jeakqual-Ahrach looked past the Twins, concentrating on The Four. “Would you care to watch while I strip the overweening infants of their power?”

Cordelia pulled out of the fear and awe. She knew that was what Jeakqual-Ahrach wanted, and thus she would fight it. “Do we have a choice?”

“Recovered some of your former insolence, Cordelia Blakeney? The aristocrat who can joke in the face of death and worse? Will you play your part to the end?”

“I merely asked if we had a choice.”

Jeakqual-Ahrach’s whole construct pulsed crimson as Cordelia goaded her, and this gave the White Twins the instant they sought. A line of light extended from the Twins to Jeakqual-Ahrach, and also back to The Four, and then on behind them. Cordelia knew what she had to do. She had to shift The Four into combat mode. Maybe this was Jeakqual-Ahrach’s construct, but that was no reason to forget their training. “Behind me, people. Just as always.”