Midnight Lamp (42 page)

Fiorinda leapt from her chair, white veils flying, the last of her shackles tearing like paper.
If she reaches fusion we are done for
.
She’s weaponised
. The thought slammed into his mind as he ran after her, a superposition of Harry’s vision, the black rose in the room with the secret Committee, and the horror that had filled him today, the ghost of Fergal, brimful now and brimming over, not his own death,
a lot
of death… Fiorinda dived to her knees, grabbed Sage by the shoulders, ‘Ax! He’s all right! Trust me, come on, get us out of here-!’

Sage was trying to stand, it was true, he was only stunned. Ax held him up, thank God this was the new, slimline Aoxomoxoa… Could they get to the exit? He’d have to fire on the unarmed crowd, only held off by their fear of Fiorinda, but he couldn’t get them all. She would have to—

Oh God, no.
She must not commit magic
-

‘Fiorinda, I can handle this. Whatever it is, don’t do it!
Don’t do it
—!’

She smiled at him, unearthly sweet, and shook her head.

Something took shape at the sanctuary rail, rising like thick smoke, bordered by flame. A big raw-boned shadow stood there, rifle on his back this time, and his sword naked in his hands. His eyes glowed. ‘Git out of here, the three of yez,’ he crooned, grinning like a Hallowe’en lantern, tossing back his shining black curls. He swung the broadsword up in a salute, and flames shot to the rooftree.

‘These darlin’s are all
mine
.’

The monster leapt, with a joyous howl, into the crowd. Ax and Fiorinda, dragging Sage between them, ran for the robing room. Ax detonated Sage’s charge, (not so delicate, this one) adding a thunderous bass to the Hieronymous Bosch chaos. Out through the blasted doorway, into the violet night.

‘Which way?’ gasped Fiorinda.

‘Up here—’

Over the barricade, down a starlit dirt street, that ended at the earthwork in a wall of timber, rubble, earth and brushwood. The Rugrat was waiting for them, immobilised and concealed, mirroring the surfaces of night. You were gone a long time, it thought, as she touched it. But I waited. I knew you’d come.

Ax saw that if the Rat tried its pit-climbing trick on the heap of shit looming over them they’d be buried. He wasn’t sure how that command worked, anyway. He swung the car around, gunned it in reverse until its arse hit the barricade at the other end of the street, and went for it. The Rugrat belted up the earthworks in RTE, almost lost it halfway up the tottering slope, bucked like a mule and powered over the top. The back of the car swung around in a lazy arc, the front wheels slid forward. It righted itself, flew over the ditch, landed bouncing and rushed up the boneyard, in a flurry of crunched Victorian memorials of violent death.

‘Wait! My saltbox!’

‘Yes, yes, saltbox, I have it, it’s safe—’

‘Give it to me, Sage! Stop the car Ax! Trust me, this is worth doing.’

They’d have given her every star in the sky. She grabbed the saltbox and jumped out, they leapt after her. Lavoisier heaved like a kicked ants’ nest, off-roaders rushing around, people milling in the church square, loudhailer orders, swathes of white light—

‘I’m afraid Rufus didn’t hold them long. Sorry.’

‘Rufus was
brilliant
, sweetheart!’

She twisted open the wooden apple, and swung her arm. An arc of white crystals soared, impossibly far, and landed on an isolated blockhouse in the outer sector. There was an instant, impressive explosion, followed by a rattling cascade of them, a firework display.

‘Their big ordnance,’ she said, with satisfaction. ‘That should keep ’em busy.’

She closed the box, held it to her breast and stared at them, a ghost in grave-wrappings, barefoot, bewildered as if she’d just woken on this hillside—

‘What
happened
to you, Fiorinda?’

‘What happened to me? Where do I begin? You know how we have mad Counterculturals? I met the
real
Counterculturals. They do things differently in America. Everything’s on a much bigger scale.’ And again she stared, a revenant lost among the living. ‘How did you find me?’

‘We didn’t,’ confessed Sage. ‘The FBI found you. Oh, Fee, I’ve lost my mask. I can’t believe I lost my
mask.
’

‘The FBI found you,’ repeated Ax. ‘We came to get you out, because they know, beyond reasonable doubt, that you have effective magic. They’re on their way to annihilate Lavoisier, and you weren’t supposed to survive. We’re not clear yet, Fio. We have to get away from here, we daren’t head back to LA, we have to keep out of sight until they’ve been and gone—’

They drove the autodump, and slipped the Rugrat in among the wrecks. Unmasked, but it didn’t look out of place: it was filthy, and had suffered a few knocks. Fiorinda laid her palm on the car’s flank, be safe, Rugrat… The trailbox was where they’d left it; they stripped off the dirty black shroud, and Ax led out the horses. Fiorinda stood with Sage’s arms around her.

‘Which one’s mine? The pinto?’

‘You can share mine,’ Sage stooped over her, inhaling her. ‘I need a co-pilot.’

‘Suits me.’

They used Paintbrush as a pack pony, and Fiorinda rode in front of Sage. Madeleine expressed some doubts about the whole deal, but she soon settled down. They headed into the hills, and at last reached a pan of level ground, hidden by steep bare slopes all around. ‘This is where we left our stuff,’ said Ax. ‘There’s a cave. I think we’ll be safe for the night at least.’

‘Ax,’ said Sage, ‘Fiorinda’s here. Who is a threat to us? We’re safe anywhere.’

The cave was known locally as the Cow Castle. It had a lick of an underground spring in the back, and a brushwood barrier at the entrance, to dissuade tourists or other vermin. Ax dragged aside the brushwood, they led the horses inside. ‘I don’t want to seem ungrateful,’ said Fiorinda. ‘But is this necessary? I’ve had enough of being underground.’

‘Didn’t plan to be,’ said Ax. ‘We’ll sleep under the stars.’

He took the camping mattress and the quilt out doors and shook the mattress to inflate it. Sage brought the stuff-bag full of presents. The three stared at each other, lips parted, awed by the silence, the calm.

‘Now, what do we have in here?’ said Ax, opening the bag. ‘No chocolate ice cream, that’s back in the Rat, but we
do
have—’

‘Marmite! Oh! You angels, where did you find this!’

‘We humbled ourselves, and asked the expats. Give her the Bombay Mix.’

‘And here’s the Bombay Mix. And the Red Stripe, but it isn’t frosty.’

‘You can dip the Marmite
in
the Bombay Mix. I m-mean, Bombay Mix in Marmite, and no one will make any remarks—’

Candy corn, liquorice, idiotic toys, a ridiculous dress, old storybooks from Westwood village… She sat among her hoard, hugging the foamy, baby-girl party dress, wiping tears from her cheeks. ‘When did you buy all this?’

‘When you went away. We were pitiful. We kept buying things that we thought would tempt you to come back.’

‘He said you’d run off because you were sick of us,’ said Ax, perfidious.

‘
Sage
!’

‘Oh,
he
only thought you were dead. He was totally grown-up and rational.’

Fiorinda chugged warm Red Stripe. Ax went to unharness the horses. Sage watched her, smiling, sipping at his own can.

‘How’s your head?’

‘Splitting.’ He grimaced experimentally. ‘Black eye, fried sinus, ouch. Don’t think I’ll try getting the button out until morning.’

She wiped her eyes again, found the end of the bandage with her fingernails, tugged it loose: and unwound it until her naked scalp was revealed, all doodled on by the amateur occult neurologists. Chin up.

‘Is that it? No other depredations?’

‘This is it. They cut my hair off, and they kept my head shaved. They kept me in an underground dog kennel, which to be fair was no worse than their own cells, they kept putting me in that damned scanner, and they made me sit in that stupid chair, bound in iron, looking at them, argh, for hours on end. Otherwise they were kindness itself.’ She laughed. ‘You won’t be able to blind me with science anymore, doctor, doctor. I know everything, all the things that are wrong with me. The standard features I don’t have, that I had to cobble up for myself. But they still couldn’t make me do magic, so they were very confused.’

‘But
you
are not confused.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m all right now.’

Ax came back. He knelt beside her. ‘My little cat, my darling, you are so beautiful. Your eyes are so bright.’

He didn’t know if he should touch her. Maybe he shouldn’t, because even to look at her was making him
unbelievably
horny. But there was Sage, lying there peacefully, silently saying go ahead, Sah, it’s okay, all okay. Fiorinda took his face between her hands, whispering Ax, my darling Ax. They lay down together kissing, and he felt himself folded in fire, wrapped in a burning calm, coming home to his own country, after a long voyage on stormy seas; coming back to himself.

Fiorinda woke, curled in the hollow between her lovers’ bodies. She touched her naked skull, to remind herself how bad it was: touched her saltbox and groped over the top of the mattress for the water bottle. Ah, cool water. She tucked the bottle back, and retreated into the valley between warm ramparts. I have found my way back to the best place in the entire world, this is my paradise. But she needed a piss.

Sage stirred and mumbled, ‘What is it?’

‘Need a piss.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

All that could be seen of Ax was a dim puddle of dark hair. ‘We mustn’t leave him on his own,’ whispered Fiorinda. ‘He might wake and us not be there.’

‘We’ll keep him in sight.’

To the south, between the hills, Orion was rising sideways, Betelgeuse just clearing the haze. They crouched on their heels in the sagebrush, watching the glint of familiar stars on two lively dark streams, as they hurried to join each other. She remembered a ritual: long ago, when she and Aoxomoxoa and the Heads were first acquainted. An initiation for the teenage mascot in a freezing cold field somewhere in Denmark on the Hard Fun Tour: digging like cats and squatting in a row, defecating with these five big men. Communal dumping, it was so important.

‘What’s funny?’

‘The shit fests.’

He laughed and put his arm around her, tugging her against his breast, resting his chin on her skull. ‘I don’t like having no hair. This is more undressed than I like to get. I feel as if I’m walking about in my bones.’

‘Don’t panic, you’ll have a Number One Crop in a day or two. It drives me nuts, how fast my hair grows… Thanks for talking me up back there, babe, I’m sorry I couldn’t match the advertising.’

‘You did great, brilliant idea bringing the immix. I wish I could have stopped Elaine, but I’d have had to take issue with her power-source, and that’s a whole other situation.’

She felt him shudder. ‘Just tell me, do they know what they’re risking?’

‘They do, and they don’t care. Their cause is just, though hell may swallow us. Sage, I’m afraid I know who the Fat Boy candidate is.’

‘Me too. I met the Watcher, remember.’

She slipped out of his embrace; or maybe Sage withdrew. Fiorinda looked at her own hands, and her feet, and the myriad reality that glowed through the flesh. The desert night was a cloak she wore. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘S’ okay.’

She hugged him, he hid his face in the hollow of her shoulder, then heaved a sigh and began to kiss her little breasts, delicious fire, reminding her that she was still hungry, hungry, hungry for
more of that
. Then Ax, who had quietly come to find them, was there, taking hold of her in the starlit dark with the hard, sure touch of his musician’s hands, she leaned back, weightless, soul-kissing with the wolf while the tiger fucked her.

Sage carried her to the mattress, they changed partners, around and around, until the meat was shared to pieces and the predators fucked to bits. ‘Hey, Ax?’ Sage mumbled, nuzzling over where her hairline used to be; he was fascinated by this new nakedness, untouched Fiorinda—

‘Mm?’

‘What d’you say, we persuade her to give the look a fair trial?’

‘No,’ said Ax firmly, wrapped around her back, sheltering her exposure as best he could, with his lips, his cheeks, the hollow of his throat—

‘Fuck off, Sage. I don’t see myself as an elective slaphead, thanks.’

‘It could be really good. You could wear a very stylish headtie or a hat—’

‘Forget it.’

‘Leave her alone, big cat. Unrestricted access to the nape of her neck is pretty cool, hm, very horny, but, that’s supposed to be our secret.’

‘Perverts. I know you’re only trying to make me feel better.’

When she woke again a pale blue dawn was well advanced. She lay looking at the broken necklets of pink cloud, scattered over the sky where Orion had been; smelling woodsmoke and coffee; listening to a curious, regular crunching sound. Oh, it’s the horses eating. Ax was watching a coffee pot, hung over a fire of sage roots. Sage stood beside the animals, patting them as they tugged mouthfuls of horse-food from a bundle (she felt betrayed. Sage was supposed to be her ally against horses). Three raw-boned rabbits with mobile black-tipped ears, like English hares, were watching the feed bundle, calculating and fearless.