Extraordinaires 1 (24 page)

If they were placid, Kingsley decided, it was a placidity of a particularly troubled kind. They weren't sheep, despite displaying considerable sheeplike qualities. It was as if a damper had been placed on their thoughts and emotions, stifling them until they were manageable.

Kingsley wondered if, underneath, the poor children were screaming.

‘It will wear off,' Evadne said as the last child – a lank-haired, limping boy – stumbled over the threshold and hurried after the others.

‘They'll be themselves again?'

‘At best, they'll remember this as a bad dream.'

Kingsley didn't really want to ask what the worst was. ‘They're on their way home. Let's see what we can do about doing the same.'

She gazed at the arch, and she fingered her satchel.

‘You can't use the phlogiston,' he said.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘You look as if you're thinking explosively, so to speak.'

‘And?'

‘The Temporal Manipulator looks as if it could be our only hope of getting home. If you blow up this place, we're stuck here.'

‘We may not have another chance to destroy the Immortals' headquarters.'

‘True, but you know what they say about a time and a place for everything.'

The floor underneath the Immortals' throne was now almost entirely completed. Spawn were on hands and knees and actually stretching the substance of the floor as if they were laying carpet. A dozen or more were on one side of the pentagon, with an equivalent number on the other. Slowly, they were roofing over the abyss.

Kingsley and Evadne huddled under a pile of rough canvas they'd found next to a scaffold. His legs were aching from the climb, but Evadne was showing no signs of weariness. She was driven. The Immortals' throne was hovering near the rotating cube. Each side of the cube shone dully with one of the primary colours – red, blue or yellow – in a pattern that Kingsley gave up trying to discern when the cube pulsed and the arrangement changed. The faces were still primary colours, but the distribution was now different.

In midair a foot or so in front of the cube, a rippling black mat was appearing. The mat tumbled down over the two steps that led to the alcove and then became part of the floor that the Spawn were stretching across the cavernous space below.

The floor was being extruded out of the air.

Magic
, Kingsley thought, and he shrugged at his newfound willingness to accept the evidence of his eyes. He wasn't foolish enough to keep insisting that there was a trick involved, that there had to be a man behind the screen. Being sceptical didn't mean refusing to acknowledge the evidence.

The Spawn on the far side of the chamber reached the stairs of the opposite alcoves. More stretching, some smoothing from side to side.

The lights went out on the cube. Its spinning began to slow until it resumed the stately rotation Kingsley had seen when they first crept into the chamber.

The river of black material stuttered, dwindled, and ended, the last of it falling onto the stairs like a black velvet drape.

Four Spawn leaped towards it. With sharp blades like sickles, they trimmed the join, smoothing it and making it straight. One of them staggered off with the offcuts of the black material that, to judge from the difficulty it had in gathering, was growing harder and less flexible.

‘A phlogiston-powered Material Manipulator, I'd say,' Evadne whispered. ‘It could explain why the Immortals don't have much to do with the rest of the Demimonde. They don't need to trade for materials.'

‘So, a Time Manipulator and a Material Manipulator.' He pointed at the empty alcove. ‘They have others?'

She shrugged. ‘While I'm curious, I can wait to find out.'

‘Can you wait two hundred and fifty years?'

‘I'm a model of patience.'

A
nger rarely sat well with a squeaky voice, Soames decided as he stood in front of the Immortals. He held his hat in one hand, ready to leave for his office, and his umbrella in the other, the most useless of shields in the face of Augustus's spittle-laced tirade. Soames took some solace in that umbrellas were at least the most British of shields. He was proud of that.

He had been astonished, dismayed and angered when the Immortals had been carried up from the depths of their lair by a brace of Spawn. How underhand of them to vanish like that and leave him as a mere caretaker! It was reprehensible!

He had an awful moment when he thought they'd come back to punish him, but they showed no signs of knowing that he'd conspired with the Neanderthals.

Of course they didn't know, Jabez
, he thought.
Your plan was masterly!

The Immortals were different. Still in the bodies of children, but
different
children. Which made sense, in an outlandish way, for hadn't Soames himself seen the Immortals torn to pieces by the Neanderthals?

Using his years of practice, he hid his feelings and welcomed the Immortals back, assuring them that he'd kept the place just as they'd left it.

It didn't stop the Immortals' ranting at him.

Augustus came to a snarling conclusion in his estimation of Soames's abilities. Jia took over, cold and hard and unstoppable as a glacier.

Migration of souls. In all Soames's scheming, all his planning, he hadn't really understood the extent of the Immortals' magic. He knew that they moved from body to body as they wore out, but he simply hadn't thought of the implications. That they had simply migrated out of their endangered bodies just before the Neanderthals descended on them and taken up residence in fresh bodies in a nearby, but undisclosed, location hadn't occurred to him.

It gave him a chill as he re-estimated the extent of the Immortals' abilities.

‘Of course I understood that your dismemberment was a mere inconvenience,' he lied when Jia's ire subsided. ‘That's why, once I discovered that those appalling Neanderthals were in residence, I brought my own band of bullies and bravoes to drive them out, clean up your . . . remains . . . and make the place secure for your return.'

In some ways he was glad to relinquish guardianship of the uncanny place, but he was irritated by the peremptory nature of their homecoming. They weren't even surprised at his presence.

‘This cannot be countenanced!' Augustus snapped. Although their physical appearance had changed, their taste in clothing hadn't, much to Soames's relief as it gave him some indication who he was talking to. Augustus's feet dangled nowhere near the floor, the same as his equally incensed colleagues'. Jia had both tiny, bloody, bandaged hands clenched on the arms of her throne and looked as if she were barely restraining herself from leaping at Soames and biting him. Forkbeard was more subdued, but only in the way that an angry bear is more subdued than an angry wildcat. His chin was down and he looked at Soames from bloodshot eyes, his lids drooping and his breath a rough rumble. His feet were bare and bandaged.

Soames was wary of their anger. There was no dignity here, no gravity gained from millennia of experience. This was the fury of the elderly, the wrath of the frustrated geriatric. While most of Soames was devoted to remaining dignified in face of the anger directed at him, a small part wondered what sort of minds were couched behind those once sweet faces. Was mental decay a fact of existence that their bodily transfer couldn't overcome?

Augustus hammered on the arm of his throne with a chubby fist that was lacking a thumb and asked the question Soames had been hoping for: ‘And you, wretch! What are you going to do about it?'

‘It', of course, was the unheard-of situation in which the Immortals had found themselves. They had been driven out of their home and had to take refuge in another – unnamed – location, they had been bested by one of their many enemies, their slowly nurtured plans had been disrupted and, just before they had escaped, they had seen the boy they had been hunting for, there, in their own hall!

Intolerable wasn't a strong enough word. Everything about it had incensed the Immortals, but Soames suspected that it had also shocked them to be confronted with evidence that they weren't as infallible as they had thought.

Soames enjoyed that. It gave him some confidence.

‘I? What will I do? I will endeavour to assist you in any way I can, as I always have.'

His plans for assuming the mantle of the Immortals would have to wait. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, for his time as lord of the manor hadn't been as trouble free as he had thought it would be. Perhaps he could use the interruption to inveigle some answers from the creatures, perhaps a pointer or two towards solving the mystery of their power.

Augustus narrowed his eyes. ‘Then find children for us. To replace those we have just used.'

‘Of course.'

Jia startled him, then, as she leaned forward, her child's face suffused red. ‘And get the boy for us, now!'

Soames blinked. ‘Now?'

‘We want his brain.' Forkbeard's voice may have had the shrillness of a six-year-old, but his essence made the child's throat grab the words, reducing them to a hideous growl.

Obscure as the Immortals' motives had always been, Soames was heartened by this insight. The boy's brain was important? Who would have thought? Soames started to think of the best way to approach the Neanderthals about the lad.

‘Getting the boy back will take much phlogiston,' he said. ‘For bribes.'

Augustus didn't answer. He sat with his arms crossed, looking away. Soames was no longer important to him. Jia glanced at her companion and hissed before addressing Soames. ‘You'll have it.'

‘And I will need time.'

Jia narrowed her eyes. ‘How long?'

‘A few days.'

She leaned towards Forkbeard and they had a rapid, whispered discussion. When they finished, she had to adjust her black wig. Soames noted that at least one of her ears was missing. Spawn production had been in full swing.

‘Three days,' she said. ‘Do not take longer. Find him. Do not bother us with minutiae.'

A Spawn trotted up and whispered in Forkbeard's ear. The fur-clad Immortal leaped to his feet, then toppled onto the cushions, howling. ‘And don't forget the children! Fresh children! More!'

Jia and Augustus muttered to each other and glanced at Soames.

‘Arrangements are under way,' Soames said, as soothingly as he could manage, quite happy if he could curry favour with two of the three Immortals. ‘I have my eye on a particularly useful source of the items you're after and your cells will be stocked before you know it.'

Augustus sat up. ‘That is what I like to hear. Go, do your work.'

Soames congratulated himself on his flexibility and quick thinking – and turned over the possibilities for wringing an advantage out of this curiously important boy.

Soames was sent to supervise the Spawn in assembling the phlogiston to trade for the boy. After some curt words from a bleeding Augustus, the Material Manipulator – the cube – glowed and spat green light at Soames. Terrified and doing his best not to show it, he found himself rising, along with a trio of newly formed – and quite dazed – Spawn.

Soames swallowed his fear and composed himself as he drifted up, high above the floor of the Hall of the Immortals. He had never been one for aerial balloon ascents, not seeing the entertainment gained by putting oneself in a state where setting foot on the earth again could be precipitous and fatal. He had trouble breathing as he rose.

A pentagonal hatch slid aside as he and his helpers drew near the ceiling. They rose through it and were gently deposited inside a chamber nearly as large as the Hall of the Immortals itself.

Soames was overcome.

He actually went to one knee. He bowed his head. He breathed deeply and tried to maintain his dignity, surrounded as he was with wealth of such a magnitude that he was light-headed, giddy, teetering on disbelief.

Jabez! This could all be yours!

Soames was forced to reappraise his estimate of the abilities of the Immortals. And their history. And their underground dominance. He was stunned by this evidence of their power, which was much greater than his already substantial estimate.

Each of the five walls that joined the floor and sloped away from him was embedded with slots, as were the walls that joined the ceiling. Most of the slots in the lower five walls contained a glowing phlogiston vial.

His brain stumbled in trying to estimate how long the Immortals had been gathering phlogiston. Centuries. Longer. The wealth here was immeasurable. With it, the Immortals could buy the world and have enough left over for a deposit on the moon and stars.

The prospect of immortality suddenly dwindled in importance. Riches, immediate and concrete; that was something much more worthwhile! Besides, if he could take this treasure for his own, he could easily overwhelm the Immortals and discover their secrets!

Numbly, he directed the Spawn to gather the requisite vials. He wasn't even surprised when a new vial appeared in midair and shot off to lodge itself in a slot on the far wall, evidence of the ongoing phlogiston extraction. Discovering the secret of the plinking noise simply wasn't important any more.

He did, however, wonder at the purpose of such a treasury. What were the Immortals doing with all this wealth? They must use some of it to power their magic – the manipulators, for a start – but what else? Did they spend time up here, gloating at their riches? Did they pile the vials in the middle of the chamber and dive into them, swimming about like pudgy pink otters?

The most ordinary of considerations took some time to nudge its way into Soames's bruised mind: the Hall of the Immortals must be buried deeper than he'd thought.

While the Spawn gathered the vials, Soames struggled. Simply by its vastness, the phlogiston treasury emphasised how inconsequential he – and every other mortal – was. In the face of the Immortals' might, ordinary earthly endeavours were meaningless.

Eventually, however, Soames remembered himself. He ran both hands through his hair. He straightened his jacket, took his tie pin out and reseated it.

If anyone is going to be in charge of such a wonder, Jabez, it should be you
.

Jabez Soames was not one to be cowed.