The Beauty of Destruction (2 page)

‘We need its power to defeat the Lochlannach,’ Bladud told them.

Britha laughed bitterly. ‘You are assuming that you can defeat the Lochlannach,’ she said.

‘Andraste’s spawn and the Lochlannach have proven that we need to be united …’ Bladud said as if Britha hadn’t spoken.

‘But not ruled—’ Guidgen started.

‘I understand the danger of the chalice’s power,’ the Witch King continued. Ysgawyn turned to look at Bladud, distrust written all over his face. Bladud ignored him. ‘Can we come to an accord?’

Guidgen peered through the rain at the Witch King. ‘An accord that will benefit you, no doubt,’ he said.

‘Of course.’

‘I don’t mind an agreement that benefits you and yours; I object when it is to the detriment of all else.’

‘Bladud may have forgotten that your people crept into our camp as we slept, slit throats and stole the blood of many, including children,’ Anharad started. Bladud was making calming motions with his hand. ‘I have not. You need to remember that he can take the chalice whenever he wants.’

Britha saw Germelqart sigh. She understood how he felt.

‘We would murder him and flee with the chalice.’ Britha was surprised at just how strong Tangwen’s voice sounded. She was staring straight at the Witch King. She was more surprised when she looked up and saw Bladud smiling.

‘At best it would bring dissension in your forces before you face the Lochlannach,’ Britha added.

‘Indeed,’ Bladud said. ‘Before the battle we sent messengers out to all the tribes asking them to meet us in the valley of the Mother Hill where the entrance to Annwn and the Place of Bones is. We could also send a message to Ynys Dywyll. I am assuming that you will abide by the judgement of the council of
dryw
?’ Bladud asked. Britha knew Ynys Dywyll, or the Island of Shadows, was a place far to the west where the southern
dryw
were trained. It was also home to their council and arch
dryw
.

Guidgen did not answer. Britha could tell by the firm expression on his wizened face that the old
dryw
was less than pleased. Britha wasn’t sure what Bladud hoped to gain from this. He had betrayed the
dryw
when he had pursued power as a warrior, leader, and ultimately
rhi
. She had heard that he had been satirised, censured and then cast out, though he still wore the robes and used the influence. She could not see the council on Ynys Dywyll ruling in his favour if they were anything like the
dryw
in her homeland to the north.

‘And you will accept the council’s
judgement in this matter?’ Guidgen asked.

‘Of course,’ Bladud said. Britha knew that if Guidgen refused then Bladud would have reason to turn on him and the
gwyllion
for rebelling against the council. The Red Chalice was a thing of power; magic and the Otherworld should be their responsibility anyway.

‘I’m surprised you would seek their guidance,’ Guidgen said suspiciously.

‘I do not have to,’ Bladud said.

‘We all had a part in retrieving it,’ Britha pointed out.

‘Aye, while you tried to betray us,’ Ysgawyn spat.

Britha looked down to hide the look of shame on her face. She had tried to bargain for the rod she needed to return to the Ubh Blaosc and her stolen, unborn daughter.

‘And you weren’t there,’ Tangwen said, staring at the
rhi
of the Corpse People.

‘We could claim it as a spoil of war from you,’ Bladud said evenly. Suddenly everyone went very still. The only sound was the rain in the trees just to the north of the ruined fort and the constant drip of water as Bladud’s threat settled in. Britha noticed Tangwen’s hand go to the hatchet pushed through her belt. She felt Caithna grip her more tightly.

‘Or?’ Guidgen managed between gritted teeth.

‘Or we seek the guidance of the
dryw
and we leave the chalice in the hands of Tangwen and Germelqart until they send someone to make judgement.’

‘Britha as well,’ Tangwen said, slurring the words slightly in her tiredness.

‘She cannot be trusted,’ Bladud said. He sounded almost sad. Tangwen opened her mouth to protest.

‘He’s right,’ Britha said.
I would give
the chalice back to Bress if I thought it would
mean I could see my daughter.

‘The Red Chalice is the responsibility of the
dryw
,’ Bladud said, glancing over at Britha as he did so.

‘I grow tired of this; speak plainly,’ Guidgen told Bladud. ‘What do you want?’

‘Your support,’ Bladud said.

‘Against the Lochlannach? Gladly.’

‘I mean your oath of loyalty.’

Guidgen stared at Bladud. Britha had never seen the old
dryw
so angry before. She suspected that he would have struck the Witch King, had it not been for the muddy crater in the way.

‘False tongue! Deceiver! Liar!’ the old
dryw
spat. Bladud narrowed his eyes but controlled himself with great restraint. They weren’t words you called a warrior lightly. ‘You swore—’

‘That we would not conquer you. We are negotiating over the Red Chalice. Have the events of the last moon taught you nothing? Show me a stronger leader and I will step aside. Or he may challenge me and kill me in single combat.’

‘We will aid and follow your leadership for—’

‘No!’ Now Bladud became angry. ‘This does not work! You know this does not work! If everyone wants one rule for themselves we are divided.’ He pointed at Guidgen. ‘That is just you putting your arrogance and the arrogance of your people before the good of all!’

Guidgen stared at Bladud. The old man was shaking with rage. Britha had to give Bladud his credit. Guidgen was wily but Bladud had completely outmanoeuvred him.

‘I will take this to my people,’ Guidgen muttered with little grace before turning and stalking out of the ruins.

Bladud watched the old
dryw
walk away before turning and nodding to Britha and then starting to walk back to camp himself. Britha wondered how much it cost him to leave the chalice at the bottom of the muddy crater. That said, it would not be seemly for him to scrabble around in the mud. Ysgawyn smiled and then followed the Witch King.

‘The child,’ Anharad said, nodding towards Caithna.

‘I will look to her,’ Britha told the other woman. Anharad looked less than sure but started back towards the temporary camp. Mabon followed. ‘Her name is Caithna!’ Britha called. Anharad stopped. Something in the set of her shoulders told Britha that the other woman was feeling her age. The highborn Trinovantes woman did not turn around, and after a moment or two she continued on her way.

Britha sagged, overcome by a sudden wave of fatigue, and she realised just how hungry she was. She looked to Caithna. The girl had fallen asleep.

‘I do not mislike Bladud …’ Germelqart started.

‘But you would not trust him with the chalice,’ Britha supplied.

The Carthaginian navigator nodded. ‘I do not think I would trust anyone with it.’

‘Except yourself?’

Germelqart looked up at her. ‘I would not trust myself with such a thing.’

Britha noticed that Tangwen was staring down into the crater at the chalice with a look of loathing on her face.

‘I had better go and get it then,’ she muttered quietly to herself. She started to climb down into the crater and almost immediately slipped. By the time she had made her way through the mud to the chalice she was covered in filth from head to foot. Her fingers curled around the red metal and she lifted it out of the mud.

He felt heavier with each step up the bone spiral staircase. It had been several days since the Dark Man’s last summons had crawled into the back of his head like a sickness. Bress hoped each time that it was the last. That his master would finally let him go, but he knew that it would not be the case this time – if indeed it ever would be.

Crom Dhubh was standing on the top of the tower looking out over the boneless, drifting bodies in the huge subterranean lake. There were no carrion eaters here, and little current to carry them away from the isle of rock that the skeletal tower grew from, deep in the huge cavern.

‘They did it, didn’t they?’ said the pale warrior with the long silver hair. He held his master’s gaze when the Dark Man turned back to look at him. ‘They defeated the Muileartach’s Brood?’

‘I was as much their father as that slug was their mother,’ Crom Dhubh said, his voice a silk corruption. ‘Does my children’s destruction please you?’

‘They will come for you,’ Bress said.

‘It does not matter, they can do nothing to me. Your Lochlannach can distract them until I am ready. The war will not be fought here.’

‘You will travel to the Ubh Blaosc?’ Bress asked.

‘Me? No, they could destroy me. You will travel there. You will die there, but you will make the Ubh Blaosc’s location known to the Naga.’

‘How?’ Bress asked, showing no reaction to the news of his imminent death. If anything, he found himself struggling not to show excitement at the prospect.

Crom’s expression of consternation looked alien on his face. ‘That is the question.’

‘You called them before.’

‘Relics from this world. The Ubh Blaosc is too far.’

‘What of the one in the cave, to the south and east?’

‘A frightened old creature, if it still exists, if my children did not consume or transform him. I have not heard his mindsong again. No. I think the answer lies in the body of the dragon.’

2

Now

Six Months Ago

The trees had been sucked towards the
portal and some residual energy still played over the stones
as lightning. They were standing there in what were thought
to be period-appropriate clothes, all of which were armoured
, though to Crabber they didn’t feel right without an
energy dissipation grid woven into their fabric. His neunonics reached
out and found a painfully slow connection to a painfully
primitive communications network. He started to assimilate information on this
world. Search routines filtered through the masses of information. They
knew what he liked.

‘I think there’s a habitation
nearby,’ his attractive, if dead-eyed ‘partner’ said.

Crabber just
smiled, and let the hybrid assault weapon hang horizontally on
its sling down his front.

‘I guess we’ll have
to kill them, then,’ Crabber said.

‘It will be cleaner
just to rewrite their memories.’

‘You’re being well behaved
. That’s not your reputation.’

His ‘partner’ turned to look
at him.‘You know as well as I do, the
job’s all that matters.’

Crabber nodded. ‘You ever think
about what we could do here? Just with what we
have in our heads, in our bodies? We could live
like kings, like gods. After all, we’ve been sacrificed
; we’re just betas, clones – the real us are living
large with the money they were paid for us doing
this pre-programmed work. I say fuck ‘em.’ His ‘partner
’ looked down at him. Programmed or not, Crabber could still
detect the slightest trace of contempt for him. ‘Couldn’t
break free, huh?’ Crabber said quietly.

‘What’s that suppos
—’

If anything his ‘partner’ was faster, but Crabber had the
drop on him. The shorter, squat, unnaturally broad-shouldered bounty
killer with the offset head had his sidearm out of
its holster and fired first. He’d changed the magazine
in the pistol for the nano-tipped bullets he was
supposed to use on the target. He put two in
his ‘partner’s’ head while the taller human was still
stepping back and bringing his hybrid weapon to bear. The
bullets beat hardening skin and armoured bone. Their nanite payload
started eating grey matter. His ‘partner’ spasmed, staggered backwards a
few more steps and then hit the ground, shaking. Crabber
was standing over him and put another two rounds in
his head. He reached down and took the taller human
’s magazine of nanite-tipped bullets and his grenade magazines
– those would be hard to come by. Then he set
the self-destruct code for the neunonics and liquid hardware
, dropped an incendiary grenade on the corpse, and walked away
.

Alpha Crabber and Patron had made one mistake. They had
let him say goodbye. His reconstructed man-plus body had
a second hard-tech neck on it. It contained some
very illegal corpse-hacking hard- and nano-ware. If he
severed someone’s head and put it on the stump
, the ’ware in his neck grew into their neunonics, hacked
their liquid hardware and interrogated them. For a laugh, it
also provided an artificial larynx and enough electrochemical stimuli to
reanimate their head briefly. So they could see what he
had done to them. Crabber was in a tough business
. He needed a laugh every now and then.

Normally, however
, Little Crabber lived on the secondary, hard-tech neck stump
. An automaton, which was just a head designed with a
complementary personality. The head was packed with electronic and immersive
hard- and liquidware. Basically, Little Crabber handled the hacking for
him.

Beta Crabber had been surprised when Alpha had agreed
to let him say goodbye. He guessed the Alpha had
assumed that Little Crabber was onboard with the plan to
sacrifice the Beta. It seemed that the automaton’s loyalty
programming hadn’t been as specific as it should have
been. The programming had to allow for dealing with clones
because their business was dangerous, but having two clones up
and running was highly illegal. Patron didn’t seem to
care about that. Little Crabber was just as loyal to
the Beta as he was to the Alpha, and he
didn’t like seeing him slaved. He had downloaded an
attack program to go after the meat-hack.

Of course
that hadn’t helped his ‘partner’. So he had to
die.

As white phosphorus lit up the night behind him
, illuminating a forest of broken trees, he drew his knife
. He had heard panicked voices after the gunshots. Doubtless they
were investigating the lights emanating from the ancient stones. He
might not have much time but he was going to
enjoy himself.

Now

Beth felt like someone had beaten every inch of her body with hammers. Even as she struggled to deal with the pain it started to recede. The technology inside her flesh was healing her. Instinctively she was aware of just how damaged she was. She was starting to feel very hungry. Like a machine, she needed fuel.

Du Bois helped her get to her feet. For some reason his leather coat, shirt, and even his jeans did not look soaked through. His clothes seemed to have repaired themselves as well. The last time Beth had seen him he’d been lying on the roof of his Range Rover with a broken spine. Despite everything they had been through, even his shoulder length, sandy-blond hair didn’t look all that out of place. He looked undernourished, though. His sharp cheekbones normally made his face look aristocratic; now they made it look angular and gaunt. Beth was up to her waist in water looking out at the choppy Solent. She was standing on the road that ran down the seafront in Southsea. The road had been completely swamped. She could barely make out the top of the remains of South Parade Pier, which du Bois and the strange bag lady – who had put the alien technology into Beth’s body – had destroyed when they had fought. There was no trace of the huge and very alien creature that she knew lived under the water. The one she had been inside. She could make out smoking wreckage in the water to the west of them, a sinking warship.

Talia! Selfish bitch!
But Beth knew her sister was gone. Talia was with the creature, or part of the creature. She wasn’t sure which. Her sister had joined the cult that seemed content to live as some sort of parasite within the alien. She staggered a little, trying to assimilate it all. She had been caught up in events: car chases, gunfights, alien creatures. It was only now that she had a moment to try and think it through. She tried to sit down in the water, borrowed weaponry still hanging off her on slings. Du Bois helped her back up with one arm, the other holding his carbine at port.

‘You want to go into shock,’ du Bois said. ‘That’s not unreasonable. The nanites, however, are trying to counteract your body’s biochemistry. You’ll be fine.’

Nearby a woman’s body floated on top of the water, and as Beth swayed she could see the gunshot wounds that had killed her. She also saw the thing that had tried to grow and pull itself out of her flesh. Beth was vaguely aware of many phones ringing in the distance.

‘Did you …?’ Beth managed. Du Bois followed her eyes to the floating body.

‘I killed her,’ du Bois told her quietly. ‘I did her a favour.’

For a moment Beth had a hysterical urge to attack du Bois. Punch him, kick him, claw at him. Just as soon as the feeling of hysteria came, it disappeared in a way that felt unnatural. She didn’t think that was the way that emotions, feelings, were supposed to work. Blue eyes looked down at her, du Bois’s expression grim.

Beth was suddenly aware of just how itchy her skin was. She scratched at it.

‘What is that?’ she asked, the unpleasant sensation distracting her for a moment from everything else that was happening.

‘It’s sporing,’ du Bois told her. ‘It’s trying to make new life. The itching is your body’s defences warring with it, protecting you.’

They heard raised voices, cries of terror and the sound of breaking glass, then an agonised scream followed by more of the same.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ Beth demanded. Despite all the strangeness she had seen, she was struggling to understand what was happening. She couldn’t stop anger creeping into her voice.

‘I don’t know. All the phones started ringing at once. If I had to guess, it was some sort of attack on the communications infrastructure.’

‘Portsmouth’s?’ Beth asked, almost hopefully.

‘The world’s,’ du Bois told her. He was no longer holding her up. He was checking all around them, his carbine at the ready.

‘I don’t know what that means,’ Beth said in a small voice. Du Bois saw some figures moving on the other side of the now-flooded boating pond. He sighted on them with the carbine and then lowered it. They were too far away to be any real threat. He glanced back to Beth.

‘Yes you do. It means that anyone who answered their phone when it rang was subject to the attack. I think they were driven insane.’

‘But that could be—’ she started.

‘We need to go,’ he told her, and started wading back towards Alhambra Road where the Range Rover had been parked. Beth didn’t move.

‘Go where?’ she demanded. ‘Everything’s fucked, isn’t it?’ Du Bois turned back towards her, still looking around. ‘I mean, you’ve just told me that the whole fucking world’s been driven mad … right?’ She sat down in the water. It practically came up to her neck. ‘And the only thing that’s stopping whatever it is that’s growing out of everyone else is the little machines inside us, right?’

‘We don’t have time—’ du Bois started.

‘Wrong! We’ve got all the fucking time! Because unless I’ve misunderstood, it’s the end of the world, right? And the only people not going to be affected by these … these spores are people like you! Well, I’m sorry, but that means a world entirely populated by either the mad or wankers!’

For a moment Beth thought she saw du Bois’s resolve falter. Then his face hardened again.

‘Your sister has gone, and that means the only hope humanity has at all is in the genetic sample I took from her. That sample is in the hands of the Do As You Please clan. They are a group of psychopathic children who use the same kind of technology that runs through your body to turn people into their fantasy playthings. They tried to take your sister, they tried to kill us, they turned all those people into their slaves and made us kill them. Even if we are all doomed I will not have them profit from our fall.’ He all but spat the word ‘fall’.

Beth opened her mouth to argue but as she did something occurred to her, and with it guilt.

‘Maude and Uday!’ she said, standing up.

They had seen the people warping and shifting as they made their way back to the Range Rover. Human bodies as cocoons consumed in the act of birthing. Flesh ran and flowed, distended mouths were frozen in silent screams.

‘Will these work?’ Beth had asked quietly, referring to the recently soaked guns du Bois had loaned her. She felt like her gorge should be rising, that panic should overwhelm her, but instead she felt strangely and artificially calm; sedated yet somehow still aware.

‘Not reliably,’ du Bois said, intent on checking the local areas, his SA58
FAL
carbine at the ready. As they made their way down the flooded, narrow Alhambra Road, away from the now-submerged beach, they could see more of the locals staggering, sliding into the water as the new forms tried to pull themselves free of their host flesh.

‘Is it an invasion?’ Beth asked.

Du Bois considered this. ‘More like an infection,’ he said, sparing a look of contempt for the dead thief floating in the water close to where they’d left the Range Rover.

Beth climbed into the passenger seat. The door had been torn off by one of the creatures that had accompanied the cult when they had come for her sister on the motorway. Du Bois sighted his weapon on some of the transforming locals who were close to the vehicle. Beth could hear the sounds of violence in the distance. She felt numb. Du Bois handed her the carbine and climbed into the Range Rover, starting it up. With trained precision Beth checked and then readied the weapon. Du Bois put two magazines within easy reach. There was an explosion in the distance. Beth looked around, her eyes freshly wet.