The Beauty of Destruction (38 page)

‘You clearly have the guilty party there,’ Guidgen said loudly. Britha noticed that Calgacus was watching Tangwen leave, grinning. ‘The gods must have acted through Tangwen because of Madawg’s guilt, or how else would you explain her defeating someone we know was her better so easily? The only question remains is, did Madawg have any help?’

The murmurs of agreement among the assembled warriors and spear-carriers were increasing in volume. Bladud stood up and walked away with as much grace as he could muster.

‘I think the little southron girl fooled us all,’ Calgacus mused.

‘And used Madawg’s fear against him. He made a stupid mistake,’ Britha said, but she too had been taken in by Tangwen’s performance. The hunter had taken her life in her hands during the first challenge because she had taken Madawg seriously enough to see him as a threat, to go looking for a weakness.

Britha watched Bladud stalk into flurries of snow with Anharad and the rest of his retinue, Ysgawyn hurrying to catch up with the Witch King.

Calgacus followed her look.

‘And I think it is a dangerous thing to humiliate a
rhi
,’ he mused. Britha nodded. ‘Do you think Tangwen will want the head?’ Calgacus asked, looking at Madawg’s body.

‘No, it is an ugly thing,’ Britha said, distracted. She had just realised that Germelqart was nowhere to be seen, nor was the chalice. She hadn’t even seen Tangwen hand it off to the Carthaginian.

Germelqart understood enough about himself to know that it was not the snow that made him cold. He no longer felt the cold in that way. It was the sight of the snow and the trick his mind played on him. It was what the Greeks called the psyche that made him shiver under his furs.

He knew he shouldn’t be out here on his own. It risked his discovery by the Lochlannach, but he had had enough of the noisy, violent, foul-smelling barbarians and their moonstruck ways for one day. He could make out the wards, drawn by the tiny glowing demons from the chalice, in the air. They would warn him if anyone approached.

He was sitting on a small rock outcrop looking down at the campfires. The night was mostly free of cloud. The stars and moonlight made the snow-covered valley glow. They were a fractious people. It occurred to him that what they really needed was a strong leader like Bladud, who they kept undermining, to truly bring them victory, tyrant or no. He thought of the Achaemenids. Sometimes what you needed was a bit of tyranny.

Germelqart closed his eyes. He felt along the threads the demons from the chalice had drawn subtly in the cold night air. He felt Selbach’s fear … no, his terror. The scout’s trews were full of his own soil. He saw through the scout’s eyes. Then the Carthaginian felt his heart start to hammer in his chest. He pushed down his own fear. Selbach was on Oeth, the island itself, standing on the highest level of the tower of bone. He felt strong, powerful fingers gripping his shoulder. Bress.

‘I found him in the tunnels as I returned,’ the tall, pale warrior from the Otherworld said.

‘There’s someone else looking through his eyes,’ the tall man with skin the colour of obsidian said. ‘Is that you, my old friend?’

Germelqart almost soiled himself. He was struggling to catch his breath. Selbach knew their plans! He had helped find the path. With a thought, tendrils grew from Selbach’s demon eyes, gifted to him by the chalice. The tendrils sought the Cait scout’s memories. The last thing Germelqart saw through Selbach’s eyes was the Dark Man reaching for him. The Carthaginian withdrew and burned every demon between there and where he sat.

He felt a different kind of cold now. Now the Pretani barbarians needed to act. He stood and started running down the hill towards the camp.

Crom Dhubh was looking thoughtfully at the blank-faced, now-blind, drooling man. Bress assumed that he was some kind of scout. His face was painted grey like the rocks. His furs and other clothing were stained the same.

‘They have found another way here?’ Bress asked, looking around. The ice was so thick that the island was no longer the good defensive position it had been. His eyes lingered over the boned bodies frozen in the ice.

‘It does not matter. They are no threat to us,’ Crom Dhubh said.

‘They stopped you at the wicker man and they destroyed the Muileartach’s spawn,’ Bress pointed out.

‘Because we let them,’ Crom Dhubh said. He didn’t seem to be entirely paying attention. ‘The Dragon’s Voice?’

Bress opened the pouch on his belt and pulled out the smooth, faintly flesh-like, eight-sided stone that he had taken from the dead dragon he had found on the seabed between the three islands.

‘This one is as good a vessel as any. He will sing the song to the Naga, he will call them.’

Crom Dhubh’s touch made Bress feel nauseous as he took the stone and pressed it against the man’s forehead. The stone started to grow through the captured scout’s head. His body shook as he spat and drooled. Then the stone was gone. Skin grew over the man’s eyes, as a reptilian eye grew in the centre of his head and his skin started to scale.

‘Start the preparations. You will go with him,’ Crom Dhubh said, and then turned to his silver-haired warrior-slave. ‘You need only live long enough for him to sing his song.’

26

Now

Beth had thought it would be like driving through the movies, but it wasn’t. It was clear this had been just another poor city with factories and slums, though at least the weather was nicer and there were palm trees.

She was wondering how much atrocity she would have to see before she became inured to it. She was sure that Bradford was the same, Portsmouth arguably worse, but there was just something about America: everything had to be bigger and better. Everything she saw made her want to close her eyes or to intervene, but they couldn’t fight the whole city. Du Bois had made it clear that they were no longer the same species. For the majority of humanity only the flesh remained.
So
that makes it okay, then?
she thought bitterly.
And what
about the sane ones?

She wondered why they weren’t attacked. Sure, they were in an armoured military vehicle, but she had seen groups of marines, presumably from Camp Pendleton, the base between southern Los Angeles and San Diego, subjugating entire neighbourhoods as if they were in Iraq. But they had just watched them drive by in their stolen
USAF
vehicle. They were ridiculously well-armed, but they weren’t that ridiculously well-armed. Did the insane know? Were they somehow aware of the alien tech circulating through Alexia’s, du Bois’s and her own veins? Were they top of the food chain in this city of atrocities? The idea seemed absurd. She could feel the biological nanites in the air, sporing from the ocean. It wasn’t as overt as what had happened in Portsmouth, but she was starting to see the physiological changes to the people of LA. They were slowly being mutated. There was some kind of strange design ethos to the mutation. Du Bois had called it terraforming. Beth had thought he had said terror at first, until her neuralware had made her aware of the mistake. She suspected that even the city’s architecture was starting to warp.

She should have gone to the moors. She had always liked the moors and now she knew how to survive there. Or she could have stayed in du Bois’s castle. Or stayed in the desert, but it had been too late then. She had found out about her father. The worst thing was, she understood that it had just been another job for du Bois. It hadn’t been personal to him. Somehow, despite how angry she was, despite her disgust at how easy it was for him to kill without a thought of the consequences, somehow she couldn’t quite bring herself to hate him, which just made her feel all the guiltier. Now she was trapped in this city with little choice but to play this out as far as it went, to grudgingly cooperate with du Bois and his sister. At least Alexia showed some reaction to the horror around them.

They had come down out of the Hollywood Hills and back into the smog- and smoke-filled basin of the city proper. They had avoided the freeways because every time they got near them stray shots bounced off the
ECV
’s armour. They had also avoided the strangely intact downtown. The city still had power. From the hills it had been like a map traced out in light. The skyscrapers still looked open for business despite the chaos. It was eerie.

They tried to keep reasonably close to the coast, avoiding areas that they had known to be dangerous before the Seeders had awoken, like South Central, but the LAX corridor was little more than a trench from multiple plane crashes, and parts of Inglewood, Culver City and Gardena were infernos. Where they could they had taken smoke-shrouded routes. Their augments meant they could still breathe where others couldn’t. Amid the smoke they’d had to hide from military personnel with gas masks that had merged with their flesh.

They had crossed a channel and Beth had got a glimpse of Terminal Island, the artificial island split between the Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles. She knew there was a prison on the island. She wondered what it was like in there now. She supposed not that many of the prisoners would have had phones. Was the prison the last bastion of the sane? Had the prisoners escaped? Or had they just torn themselves apart anyway, without the direct influence of the Seeders?

They had turned off East Anaheim Street and onto an avenue that quickly became a dirt track, sandwiched between a used car lot and junkyards. The dirt road ended at train tracks, and beyond that she could see yellow mountains of sulphur. The whole area stank of rotten eggs. She scanned either side as they travelled down the dirt track. There was very little movement, though the
ECV
’s passage scattered a pack of dogs, mostly pit bulls.

Alexia drove the vehicle down to the tracks and turned it around so it was facing out of the alleyway.

‘You bring me to the nicest places,’ she said quietly. There was little humour in her voice. Beth sort of liked the woman but she was sure that Alexia had been quite a frivolous person before this. She was worried that du Bois’s sister was even less prepared for all this than she was. She felt a spike of anger when she considered for a moment that du Bois might actually be enjoying himself on some level. Then she remembered his response to La Calavera.

There was a line of old freight cars that had clearly been there for some time. At first she thought there were still homeless people living there. Sat round an unlit fire pit, or around trashcan braziers, but then she realised that they had been posed. Then she saw the head poles. Then she realised that the bodies had been decapitated … and the heads of goats sewn onto their necks.

‘Hobo camp,’ she heard du Bois say. ‘Most of them wouldn’t have had phones.’ That didn’t make it better.

Beth climbed down from the turret, grabbed her
LMG
and got out of the
ECV
. Her movement sent clouds of black flies into the air.

‘Let’s get on with this,’ she snapped and started heading towards the freight cars. Du Bois grabbed her by the shoulder and almost got hit for his trouble. She turned on him.

‘Look, I understand you hate me—’ he started.

That
’s the problem,
Beth thought. She knew she should, she just couldn’t quite bring herself to do so. Her father’s life, as far as she could tell, had been just one long streak of misery. He had given up a long time ago. He would not have survived any of this. He would have suffered. She knew that du Bois had done him a favour. Knowing this just made her feel worse.

‘But if you’re in this we still have to work together.’

‘What do you want to do, sir?’ she demanded, knowing that she was being petty. Du Bois just shook his head and turned towards the freight cars.

‘So I think it’s that one,’ Alexia said grimly, pointing at one of the freight cars further down the line away from the hobo camp. It was full of bullet holes.

The three of them walked towards it, looking all around them, weapons at the ready, checking the freight cars they passed. As they got closer to the bullet-ridden freight car, Beth could see a lot of bullet cases glinting in the morning sun. Du Bois picked one up, briefly examining it.

‘Five-point-fifty-six millimetre. Judging by the amount of them I’m guessing they were fired from fully automatic weapons. They just turned up and sprayed the place.’

Beth and Alexia covered him as he yanked the sliding door open and then climbed up into the dark interior.

‘Anything nice?’ Alexia asked.

‘A flaying,’ du Bois said.

‘Nobody just kills anyone any more, do they?’ Alexia said. ‘I’ll stay out here and mind the car.’

Beth glanced at her slightly irritably before climbing into the freight car. There were five bodies inside. The air was thick with flies. It looked like the victims, whoever they were, had been living there for a while. There were bedrolls on the ground, books, pornography, a camp stove, and a selection of unappetising looking ration packs. The bucket in the corner stank. All five of them had been carefully flayed. There wasn’t a scrap of skin on them. In some ways that they’d only been flayed was a relief. That was when Beth really started to worry about herself.

Du Bois was gripping the blade of his tanto, releasing his blood-screen, presumably programmed for forensic analysis. There were some shell casings on the ground. Beth picked one up.

‘Russian seven six two,’ she said. ‘Probably from an AK pattern weapon.’

Du Bois was looking inside one of the corpse’s mouths. ‘Eastern European dental work. I’m guessing these guys were ex-military.’ He pointed at wounds in the flesh of one of the bodies. ‘They were shot first. Someone turned up, maybe as many as ten shooters, emptied rounds into the car, then came in and did this.’ He pointed at some scrape marks on the planks of the freight car’s floor. ‘They took something.’ He concentrated. Beth was sure he was getting information back from his blood-screen. He pointed at one of the bodies. ‘He was flayed alive …’

‘Nice.’

‘The rest were done post mortem. Here’s the thing, though – this happened a week ago.’

‘This was done by sane people?’

‘Obviously not, but they weren’t subject to the Seeders’ influence when it happened. Probably a gangland ritual killing, to warn them off retaliation.’

‘The
DAYP
?’

Du Bois shook his head. ‘They could have had someone do it for them, I suppose, but I suspect this happened before they knew they needed whatever it was that was here. Whoever did this has gone to some effort as well. The guards had discipline. Though why they don’t just park these things in some garage in faceless suburbia I don’t know.’

‘Everyone is … was … looking for terrorists. Nobody cares about the people down here, and nobody would listen to them. Your blood-screen tell you what they were guarding? Nuclear? Biological?’

‘Well, if the
DAYP
are interested then I’d guess the Russian mob had stumbled over S- or L-tech, possibly a weapon, which could be really bad news for us.’

‘Could La Calavera have done this and then sent us on a wild goose chase?’ Beth asked.

‘Possibly, but why bother? Why not just tell us that he couldn’t help us?’

‘He didn’t strike me as incredibly sane, and he’d definitely be capable of something like this.’

‘Maybe he wanted to appear to be co-operative,’ du Bois mused. ‘Xipe Totec.’ Beth had heard La Calavera mention Tezcatlipoca, one of the Aztec gods, but du Bois had seemed to think that the gangster had been referring to Mr Brown. Xipe Totec was the Aztec god who had been known as the ‘Flayed One’. His sacrifices had involved ritual flaying.

‘You want to go back to see La Calavera?’ Beth asked.

‘Not if I can help it. We go back there, I suspect one of us will kill the other.’

Beth wasn’t in a hurry to go back there either.

‘So?’

‘I need a car battery.’

The current from the battery was just enough to kickstart the heart. The nanites from du Bois’s blood were enough to do the rest. The nanites clustered together to provide artificial stimulus for an atrophied heart and neural pathways. Du Bois had programmed the nanites to kill signals from the man’s nerve endings. He had picked the one who been flayed alive because he would have seen the most.

The flayed man opened his eyes. Beth had expected panic. His blue eyes were oddly calm, perhaps because of the lack of pain. He looked up at them both and then down at himself.

‘How long?’ he asked in Russian, which of course she understood now.

‘A week,’ du Bois told him, ‘maybe a little more.’ The man nodded. ‘Can you tell us what you were guarding?’

‘Could I have a drink?’ he asked. A hip flask hit the boards of the freight car, thrown by Alexia. The flayed man picked it up and took a sip from it. ‘I taste nothing.’

‘You’ll have to take my word for it, it’s good stuff,’ Alexia shouted from outside. In the distance Beth could hear dogs growling, fighting over something.

‘What were you guarding?’ du Bois asked again. The flayed man was staring at the bloody boards of the freight car’s floor. Finally he looked up at Beth and du Bois.

‘How long do I have?’ he asked.

‘Not long,’ du Bois told him.

‘I need a phone.’

‘Things have—’ du Bois started to explain.

‘Once you have told us what we need to know,’ Beth said. Du Bois frowned, looking over at her. ‘What were you guarding?’

The flayed man was studying her. ‘Even if I wanted to I couldn’t tell you. It was a sealed crate. Not drugs. Not refrigerated. About four feet long by two across and two deep. No markings on the crate. Whatever it was it was important enough for them to get us to guard it all the way from Ukraine. I’m guessing a weapon of some kind.’

‘Hermetically sealed?’ du Bois asked. The flayed man shrugged. ‘What happened here?’

‘People turned up and shot us.’ He gave his answer a little more consideration. ‘A lot.’

‘Who?’ Beth asked.

He shrugged. ‘We heard the sound of cars, performance engines by the sound of them. We grabbed our weapons and then there were a lot of bullets coming into the carriage.’

‘Did you see any of them?’ Beth asked.

‘I got tagged pretty bad, in the shoulder, side, leg. I was in and out but I saw the man with the black glass blade who did this.’ He gestured at his body, then he looked down. ‘But he wore a mask, like for ice hockey.’

‘And you have no idea who they were?’ du Bois asked.

‘In my country yes, but here, I’m not so sure.’

Beth frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We were under surveillance. We were sure it was
FBI
counter terrorism. In Russia the SVR … if we had something they wanted …’ He gestured at the sunlight shining through all the bullet holes. ‘Here I don’t know …’

Beth looked at du Bois. ‘The
FBI
did not do this.’

‘The CIA would do this,’ the flayed man said. ‘I worked with them in Afghanistan, but they would not do it in America I think. A phone?’

‘You’re sure it was government surveilling you? Some of the Mexican cartels …’

‘It was government. A phone.’