Merciless Reason (26 page)

XXVII

RUN OR FIGHT, KILL OR BE KILLED

DUSK WAS SETTLING OVER THE MOUNTAINS
as Nate trudged up towards Fraughan Rock Glen, a narrow valley that climbed up between two grassy cliffs. He had been walking for most of the last two days, wandering across the Wicklow Mountains in his search. The bullet wound in his shoulder had almost healed, though his ear still throbbed a bit and his legs ached from climbing up and down hills. He had spent the previous night in a fitful sleep, wrapped in a blanket in the roofless ruins of a stone cabin that had been abandoned years ago, perhaps as far back as the Famine. Cottages like it still littered the landscape after this isolated area had been emptied of people. The boughs of a larch had spread over the ruins, offering some additional shelter, but the cold had still seeped into his stiff muscles and Nate had suffered the nightmares again.

Just as, twenty years before, millions of starving people had seen their crops, their food, rot into foul-smelling pulp, so Nate was forced to watch an entire civilization suffer the same fate night after night. He wondered if he would ever be free of these haunting images. More than three years ago, the squirming creature inside him had drawn him away from his home with the dreams it had planted in his mind, taking him halfway around the world to show him the remains of that civilization … and evidence of the holocaust that had destroyed it. At first he had believed it wanted him to reclaim the science that had created the intelligent particles, but he soon realized the truth. The visions it …
she
showed him were a warning. A warning that it could all happen again. It made him hate the serpentine coiled in his gut. He despised her for choosing him.

Feeling weak and exhausted as he did now, Nate was oppressed by the weight of the knowledge he possessed, made miserable by it. Right at this moment, he felt utterly overwhelmed by the thought of facing his cousin. He was convinced that if he tried to fight Gerald, he would lose … and pay a horrible price for his failure.

He had spent all of that day around Glenmalure Valley, but with no luck. It would be dark before long, and the small bulls-eye lantern he carried was almost out of fuel. The flat-topped hulk of Lugnaquilla Mountain was out of sight off to his right, hidden by the side of the valley. He strode through a clump of heather and—

In a small explosion of foliage, feathers and frantic movement, a pheasant burst from its hiding place at his feet, making a break for the sky. It happened in an instant, faster than a human eye could track. Nate found himself gripping the bird by the neck, on the verge of killing it, his sense of reason reacting slower than his reflexes. The panicked bird squawked hoarsely and struggled to free itself. Nate gritted his teeth, overcoming the powerful, angry urge to break the creature's neck. The scare it had given him had awoken his base instincts: run or fight, kill or be killed. He let the bird go and watched it flap away into the air. This would be his only advantage when facing Gerald—and the greatest danger. All too often, Nate allowed his instincts to rule his actions. Something Gerald would never do. Nate shook his head and sighed.

The stream flowing past him on the left gurgled and gushed invitingly. Beyond this point, the trees thinned out and the ground would be more open, the cutting wind stronger as he neared the top of the ridge. Pulling the pack from his shoulders, he knelt down to drink the cool clear water, giving blessed relief to his parched throat. He sat back on a rock and looked down the glen at Glenmalure Valley below. The landscape was already dark against the dimming sky. Soon it would be hard to see—the sky was overcast so there would be no moon or starlight. A shroud of dejection wrapped itself around him. He had been sure he would find it here. It was where he had first encountered the creature.

Duffy, Dempsey and their men were to meet him in Dublin, but he had something to do here first. On reflection, he should have brought a horse, but the beast did not like horses, and horses most definitely did not like the beast. Dublin was a long way from here, and he would need some kind of transport to get back. There was an inn at the other end of Glenmalure where he might buy a horse—he had the money—but even that was a long walk away. He wasn't even close to the road.

Opening his jacket, he reached inside and pulled out his mother's letter. The one she had written to his father. The one she had not finished before he imprisoned her in the asylum. There was one piece of it that he kept turning over and over in his mind as he walked. He read the lines again:

I have always known that you were raised in an environment that brutalized you and encouraged the most predatory and ruthless instincts within you, and I have spent my entire married life struggling to come to terms with the conflicting sides of your character—the implacable leader of men that is your public face, and the tender, loyal and loving husband that so few people see.

Nate kept thinking of his own son and how he had deserted him—how he had deserted all of the people he had loved. And then, after having his eyes opened in South Africa and seeing how the intelligent particles had destroyed a civilization, he had been forced to face the violence in his own nature and the consequences of allowing it to overwhelm him.

He had once believed that he was more like his mother than his father, even though he had not known her long. His years spent defending Berto while his brother, as Patriarch, had tried to reform the family, had shown Nate a side of his own character he had found disturbing. Reading his mother's words again, he wondered how she could ever have considered Edgar Wildenstern loving or tender. Nate put his hand up to his ear. The air was cooler and instead of hurting him, it helped ease the throbbing in the side of his head. He thought back to the fight on the train, the gun-fight in Limerick, the bare-knuckle match in the Peggy Sayer in Boston and all the other conflicts in which he had been involved. He would not have thought himself a man of violence, and yet his life was filled with it. Was this circumstance, that it was forced upon him, or did he actually seek it out? Could he have lived his life by the standards he demanded of himself, and avoided these conflicts? He was not like Daisy, he knew; with her iron principles, her disciplined mind. She had always refused to sink to the family's levels. The same could not be said for Nate.

In truth, he was more like his father than he wanted to admit. He knew little enough about Edgar's early life. Perhaps the only real difference between them was that while Edgar had chosen to immerse himself in the family and control it, Nate had fought to get out of the family. He had tried to change his circumstances.

And yet here he was, about to return again. The rightful Wildenstern Patriarch was coming home. And he knew that when he walked through those gates once more, violence would be inevitable.

As if to underscore this thought, Nate heard a low, rumbling growl. He turned to look over at the trees that butted up against the sloping cliff to his right. There was the faintest rustle of something heavy in the undergrowth under the shadows of those trees. Nate tucked the letter back into his pocket and stood up. Two lights gleamed out at him, one slightly duller than the other. A low, bulky shape crept forward out of the tree line. Its front wheel was nearly a foot wide, it was about four foot tall at the shoulders and nearly three across. The horns that acted as handlebars arched up, curving back from the sides of its head, a shadowy shape behind those glowing eyes. The crunch of heather being crushed beneath its wheels could be heard as it came closer, its size and shape difficult to make out behind the light. Its snarl was like a grindstone chewing on gravel. It drew closer still, steam exhaling from its nostrils. It raised the volume of its engine to a roar … and lunged forward.

Nate stood his ground as the thing rushed towards him. It covered the thirty yards between them in an instant, missing him by inches as it charged past, skidding into a turn as it jumped the stream, sending rocks flying from its spinning back wheel. It stopped there, head and shoulders low as if ready to pounce, growling and trembling as it locked Nate with its intense stare.

He knew its powerful, sleek form as well as he knew his own face. Formed of silver metal and black ceramic, with markings of red and gold, its horse-sized body stretched between two pairs of muscular legs holding wide wheels which could withstand high speeds and all manner of terrain. It had haunted this area for centuries, before Nate had caught it and become its master. He had not tamed it—this thing would never be tame—but it had once accepted him and trusted him.

When it turned its head slightly to the side, he noted the ragged scar across the left side of its face. The eye on that side was duller too. Nate winced. He had given the beast that scar. They had not parted on good terms.

“Hello, Flash, you old cur,” he whispered. “I need you back.”

The growling velocycle, the Beast of Glenmalure, slinked forward and rubbed its head against his chest and he wrapped his arms around its neck.

“I'm headed home, old friend,” Nate said. “I'm going to need all the help I can get.”

Nate whooped with the thrill of the speed, clinging to Flash's back without a saddle as they tore down the road that ran along the valley. Clouds of dust billowed out behind them, the road ahead picked out by the beams of Flash's piercing eyes. They leaped off humps in the road, Flash's engine letting out deep-throated roars that terrified the occupants of the few scattered cottages along the road. It had been some time since they'd heard the beast so close to their homes.

Flash swept into a left turn and raced up a hill flanked by forested slopes on either side, on the road that would bring them to Laragh, and the main road through the mountains to Dublin. It was a wonderful, twisting turning route up into the hills and Nate relished the thrill of maneuvering Flash at high speed along the narrow road. They swung round a tight corner, Flash's rear wheel digging into the clay as it bounded forward—

The back of Nate's head hit the hard surface of the road even as he was abruptly aware of a sharp pressure on his shoulders and throat. He couldn't breathe. The world tilted sickeningly around him. He was lying on his back on the road and his neck felt as if it had been cracked like a whip, his throat as if it had been struck by a burning strap of leather. There was a line of pain across his chest and shoulders. Putting a hand to his head, he groaned, struggling to regain his addled senses. If this was another of Gerald's ambushes, he was in serious trouble. His pistol had fallen from his belt. The one in his boot was within reach, but he was too stunned to coordinate his hand and leg together to pull it out.

He noticed the rope suspended horizontally above and behind his head. It was stretched across the road at chest height. That was what had knocked him off Flash's back. Any further theorizing was pushed aside as a revolver was pointed at his face.

“Stand and deliver, your money or your life!” a voice barked at him.

Nate squinted up at the dark, trying to focus his blurred vision on the masked figure who held the gun.

“I didn't think highwaymen said that kind of thing outside of cheap novels,” he remarked.

“You're rich enough to ride an engimal,” the figure sneered, “but stupid enough to come through my domain at this time of night? A perfect victim. Your money, you dog, or I'll—”

The robber's threat was cut off in mid-breath as Flash hit him from behind and flattened him against the road, one big wheel pressing down on the miscreant's back. The man, who appeared shorter than average, cried out in a rather high-pitched voice. Pinned there by the mighty velocycle, he squealed in frustration. His pistol was just out of reach, so he went to pull another one from his belt, but Flash gave a low rumble of its engine and the robber went quite still.

Nate sat up and sighed, rubbing his neck and the back of his head.

“Jesus, perhaps this stuff does seek me out,” he muttered.

Standing up, he wobbled for a moment, waited until he had found his balance, and walked over to his attacker. A black tri-cornered hat lay on the ground near the man's head—though he seemed more a boy than a man. He wore a black headscarf covering his hair. Nate picked up the old-fashioned hat and stared at it in bemusement.

“Who are you supposed to be, Dick bloody Turpin?” he asked. “What century do you think you're in?”

The robber lifted his head and looked up. He tried to twist around to face Nate, but Flash gave a grunt and he went still again.

“Nate?” he said in a girlish voice. “Nate? Is that you?”

Nate knelt down and pulled the headscarf off the boy, to reveal that he was not a boy at all.

“Tatty?”

“Nate? Oh my God! Nate!”

He pushed Flash off her and lifted her onto her feet. She was dressed in a man's clothes, her tunic, trousers, belt, riding boots and cloak all colored black. Apart from the distinctive hat, she looked every part the scoundrel. Her arms were around him in an instant and she hugged him as if he was the only thing holding her to the earth. He hugged her back, squeezing her into him. They didn't say anything at first—she just heaved great sobs as she pressed her face into his chest, and he tucked his chin over her shoulder, stroking her blonde hair. His aching chest and back reminded him of his fall and he lifted his head to look into her face.