A Quantum Mythology (3 page)

‘Talia, I can either hurt you or drug you, or you can cooperate. Which do you prefer?’

‘What are you going to do with me?’ She remembered the red room. The fear was trying to rise within her again. She wanted to move away from the wall. She knew there were dead people on the other side of it.

‘Sell you,’ the man said eventually.

She nodded as if this was an obvious answer. Then she started to cry. The skull-faced man frowned but let her cry, watching her as if it was a test of some kind.

‘Don’t hurt me,’ she pleaded.

‘I’ll try, but sometimes …’ he said. ‘It’s not easy, you know?’

She stared up him. The soporific effects of whatever he had spiked her with were battling the terror that wanted to overwhelm her.

‘What’s your name?’ she said at last, more for something to say than from any real interest in the answer.

‘Scab,’ he said. She snorted with laughter and then clamped her hand over her mouth. ‘Woodbine Scab.’

‘Like the cigarette?’

Scab reached into his suit jacket and drew a cigarette case from his breast pocket. Talia noticed that his teeth were stained yellow. They were also filed to points and capped with silver. He offered her a cigarette. Trembling, she took one. He took one for himself and then lit both.

Again?
He wondered why Scab had killed him this time. Then came the terror. He began to thrash in the strangely murky nutrient gel of the clone tank as he remembered Ludwig, blithely ignoring the
Basilisk
’s
defences, phasing through the craft’s hull and into the converted corvette-class ship’s interior.

An Elite! A fucking Elite had killed him!
What he couldn’t understand was how he was being cloned. He’d run out of clone insurance after the last time, when Scab had cloned him and refused to tell him how he’d died in the first place. More to the point, when Elite killed they tended to infect the neunonics with viruses that not only scrambled memory uploads but could remain hidden long enough to snake their way into insurance company personality/memory backups and destroy them as well.

He wondered if he was going to be cloned just long enough to appreciate the process of turning into a mentally scrambled freak, with the possibility of being a preprogramed slave to boot.

He became calmer as narcotics flooded his system. He audited himself. He was a mostly natural insect. It was the usual cloning process. The gel protected his fragile exoskeleton from the ravages of gravity, artificial or otherwise. His neunonics felt rudimentary. Presumably he was waiting for components, assuming that whoever had paid for his cloning was going to rebuild his hard-tech-enhanced body so it could be of use.

Then it struck him. If he’d been captured, any one of the massively powerful people Scab had pissed off could be holding him. The insect-run Queen’s Cartel – he’d released a virus in their Arclight habitat after killing an extremely expensive blank. The Consortium – they’d wanted the cocoon Scab had been paid by a mysterious client to find. The Church, who wanted to stop everyone getting the cocoon in case it broke their monopoly on bridge technology. Or the Monarchists could be holding him, because Scab had just tried to attack the Citadel of their Elite. But none of this made sense, however. If he’d been captured, why clone him? Why not just drop his personality/memory backup into a torture immersion? The horrible thought occurred to him that he might be the prisoner of some fetishist weirdo who preferred the incredibly less efficient and more time-consuming torture of actual flesh.
Oh, excrement, I’ve been sold to some sicko as their insect meat puppet!
It was the only possible explanation his slightly addled and drugged mind could reach.

Through the dirty gel he could see he was in an unevenly paved stone room with an arched entrance. The tank itself was made of what looked like polished dark wood with brass fittings, though he’d had to use his rudimentary neunonics to look up both materials.

The only illumination in the room came from the tank itself, a transparent-fronted cold storage made from similar material to the clone tank, and some strange burning things in a kind of specialist rack, which were called candles, according to Vic’s neunonics.

Fear overcame narcotics when the red-clad monk, a cowl covering his features, walked into the chamber. He was followed by a crystal and wood cylinder, also with brass fittings, floating on an AG motor. A thick, black, viscous liquid flowed around inside the cylinder, apparently with a life of its own.

His first thought was the Church. That was frightening enough, but it was the realisation that this
wasn’t
the Church – that he had, in fact, been cloned by a heretical cult – that really made him exude pheromonic terror.

It was difficult to tell, but he assumed the monk was watching him. He had no idea what the cylinder of black liquid was doing, or even what it was. Then the pain started. He felt something growing through the meat of his brain. Tweaking the pain centres. His neunonics weren’t as rudimentary as he’d initially thought. They were invasive. It was an audit. Whoever was doing it didn’t just want to know something. They wanted to know everything. His mandibles locked open in a constant silent scream. It lasted a long time and stimulants pumped through his system kept him awake through it all. They wanted coherent thought, not the subconscious ramblings of an insect mind modified to be more human so he could embrace his humanophile tendencies and dream.

He was exhausted and in pain from the exertion of constant thrashing in the dense gel. He recognised the shape of Scab, sitting slouched on the ornately carved dark-wood chair now next to the tank, smoking.

‘I had to know,’ Scab said over the ’face connection. It would never be an apology.

‘What have you done?’ was all Vic could manage.

‘Things have moved on. We … I have the cocoon.’

Vic was always impressed by Scab’s ability to inspire more fear just when you assumed you’d reached your tolerance threshold for the emotion.

‘So give it to your employer and let’s get paid,’ Vic said, with a sinking feeling. Scab just shook his head. ‘In that case, just wait around for any number of people to come and kill you. Can you switch me off first?’

‘No.’

‘Why not, Scab? Why not?’

‘You’re useful.’

‘Do you really need me, Scab?’ Vic demanded. The human didn’t answer. ‘Then switch me the fuck off.’

‘You tried to kill me,’ Scab said at last. Vic thought he heard sadness in Scab’s voice but then assumed he must have imagined it. ‘But it’s not in you. It must have happened after.’

So that was what the audit had been looking for. Apparently, after Ludwig – a machine Elite from the Monarchist systems – had killed him, Vic’d been cloned again. Then something happened that made him try to kill Scab, and Scab had him cloned yet again.

‘Maybe it was after the
fucking Elite killed me
!’ Vic screamed. He was pleased he’d managed to emote human screaming across the ’face link.

‘Do you want to kill me now?’ Scab asked.

‘Fucking obviously.’

‘I wasn’t looking for intent. I was looking for the will.’

This stopped Vic. He often fantasised about killing Scab. He thought he’d always managed to hide it quite well from the human, even during the frequent neural auditing required by their ‘partnership’ agreement, though none had been as invasive, deep or all-encompassing as the last one. Scab was right, though. Even after everything, even after this, he knew he wouldn’t be capable of acting on his murderous feelings towards the human. He was too frightened of him.

‘They’re going to send Elite after you,’ Vic said weakly. ‘No amount of being a vicious little prick will help you.’

‘I don’t think so. They can’t risk me utterly destroying her. It’s the Church we need to worry about.’

‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then,’ Vic said, nailing sarcasm.

Vic hung in the tank in silence for a while. He could see the red glow of the tip of Scab’s cigarette through the murky gel.

‘When will this be finished?’ the insect asked.

‘All I can promise you is a quick and easy death if I have any control over it.’ This last was difficult for Scab. He was uncomfortable admitting the possibility of a loss of control.

‘I’m not like you, Scab. I want to live.’

‘It’s the best I can do. It’s either that or I leave you in a torture immersion with the longest time dilation I can find.’

‘Audit me again, see if I can kill you now,’ Vic ’faced with real venom, but they both knew it was only bravado. They both knew he would do what he was told.

3

Britain, a Long Time Ago

Back when Germelqart could still think, back when there was more to him than pain, more to him than burning in the chest, agony in the screaming muscles in his legs and arms as he tried to keep swimming, back when he was a man, he wished he had never read Herodotus. He wished he had never heard of the Cassiterides, the Tin Islands, and the moon-touched Pretani who inhabited them. Wished he had never signed on with his friend and captain Hanno to use his gifts to navigate the
Will of Dagon
in his god’s name.

The beach was not getting any closer. It was a dream. Once, he lived for the sea, but that was the warm blue sea within the Pillars of Herakles, not the cold, grey seas surrounding this land of mists, monsters and madmen.

It took a while for his exhausted mind to understand what the feel of the silt through the water meant. He was crawling as much as he was swimming now. He dragged himself onto the beach and collapsed, gasping for breath, trying to draw air into burning lungs.

He could not quite manage thought yet. He saw but did not understand the black, greasy smudge of smoke in the air coming from the giant burning, man-shaped cage to the west of the island on whose beach he now lay. He could smell burned flesh and effluence. Even if he had been thinking clearly he would have struggled to understand why the giant burning man of wood and metal had started to disintegrate and fall into the water.

Once, he had known that the dark tendrils in the water were blood from the hundreds who died there, reduced to a crimson froth in the feeding frenzy of the things that were neither shark nor human. The creatures that had been waiting for them in the water.

Now he just about understood that the black ships with hulls made of skins – the Pretani called them
curraghs
– that he saw surging through the water against current and wind were bad. Crewed by demons. He did not have the strength to crawl away from the black ships. He lay on the wet sand under what passed for a sun god in this cold northern land, letting the little waves break over him.

As the burning in his chest subsided, as thought slowly returned and with it understanding of his surroundings, he noticed a figure standing among the sharp grasses of the dunes further inland. He wore a robe of some kind, but even from where the navigator lay the robe looked filthy and stained. The figure held a staff with various small items hanging from it, and there was something wrong with the man’s face.

Germelqart understood that there were people running across the sand towards him. He wondered if they were coming to help him. In this cursed land he thought probably not.

Bress knelt among the smoke and flame, leaning on his now quiet sword stained with the blood of Fachtna, the warrior from the
Ubh Blaosc
, the Egg Shell. They had failed. It meant less than nothing to him.

There had been enough meat left in him to feel the pain of the Muileartach, the primal goddess who dwelt beneath the waters. Her pain had been caused by the suffering he wrought in Crom Dhubh’s name to summon Llwglyd Diddymder, the Hungry Nothingness.

Crom Dhubh’s touch, that ever-present, disgusting violation, had been lost among the Muileartach’s screaming. Now he felt the tendrils of the ‘Black Crooked One’s’ presence creeping through his mind as the wicker man started to disintegrate. The cage of wood and metal was returning to its constituent parts. Hiding the evidence of its violation of history.

It was a mistake to kill the warrior.
The words were like rotting silk in his mind.

Only in light of your failure
, Bress thought. Even in his armour, the heat of the flames was becoming too much against his immortal skin. The wicker man felt progressively more unsteady underneath and around him.

Our
failure
, Crom Dhubh reminded Bress as his flesh started to smoke and blister.

I did what I set out to do … what you wanted me to do.

This Fachtna could have shown us the way to the
Ubh Blaosc
. The slaves of the Lloigor are one of the few threats to us left.
There was no anger there, not even real reproach. Reproach or anger would have required some connection, some recognition on the part of the Dark Man that Bress was an equal, or even something remotely similar to him. If that had ever been the case it was a long time ago.

The whereabouts of the
Ubh Blaosc
are only important in light of
your
failure
, Bress reiterated. He didn’t add that this was because things still existed. He didn’t have to. Crom Dhubh, the Dark Man, knew his thoughts. There was no reply, but Bress could still feel the other as a corrupt presence living like a parasite in the back of his mind.

What now?
Bress asked. His lungs were full of smoke but he did not cough, nor did tears stream down his soot-stained face. All around him the metal and wood framework of the wicker man looked as if it was eating itself.

Nothing.
It was little more than a distant hiss.

He was discarded. No longer required. He had expected to feel something – relief, maybe, even so far from what could laughingly be called home. Maybe even loss as the Dark Man’s presence bled out of him. He felt nothing.

He stood up as flames reached hungrily for his flesh. The wicker man shook beneath him with every movement. He searched for feeling again as he strode to what remained of the edge of the platform. There was no sky now, only thick, greasy, black smoke.

His thoughts returned to the woman. From his perspective she was little more than a savage. But he remembered her naked form, painted blue like the night, when she had come to try and kill him. He remembered feeling her skin under his long fingers.

Skin bubbled, blistered, burned and healed, again and again. Even with his tolerance for pain it was becoming too much. He stepped into the smoke. As he fell his thoughts were still of Britha. Crom Dhubh was just a receding, mocking laughter in the back of his mind.

The one called Bress had said that Fachtna was dead. Teardrop was dead, though Tangwen had the feeling he died some time before he stopped moving and talking, consumed by the crystalline magic that lived inside his swollen head. The captain of the ship that had taken them west along the Grey Father, into the lands of the Atrebates, was dead as well. Though he kept talking even after his head had been taken, until she helped kill Ettin. And she did not know where Britha was.

All her muscles ached and her chest burned, for the current was strong here. After all the swimming and the climb to the wicker man, which even now was burning as it crumbled into the water behind her, she was surprised that somehow she was still moving towards the easternmost island.

She might have grown up in a marsh, but she was beginning to think she never wanted to see water again for as long as she lived. Judging by the moonstruck on the island towards which she now swam, who had mocked them, as they had marched towards Bress’s forces, living long might not be such a problem. She had seen the feast they left for the crabs and the other things that lived in the water.

She was peripherally aware of others swimming near her as she made for the beach. Survivors. Those who’d been strong enough to live through their imprisonment, escape from the burning wicker man into the water, survive the unnatural feeding frenzy at the claws and teeth of the children of Andraste, and then swim against strong currents to the eastern island.

So few of them left.

Her hands and feet touched silt. Now she could allow the hope she had denied herself in the water. She tried to stand, but burning muscles protested and she collapsed into the water again. She would crawl if she must – she knew she had to get out of the water.

On either side of her, people were staggering up the beach and collapsing. She saw figures sprinting towards them from the dunes further inland, kicking up sand as they ran. Clothed in rags, if wearing anything at all, many of them were painted with lime, woad, blood and excrement, or decorated with crude tattoos and self-inflicted scars. Carrying makeshift weapons, they howled, and gibbered as if they were angry at the sun for not being his brother the moon.

Tangwen, the huntress of the Pobl Neidr, the People of the Snake, a tribe of the Catuvellauni to the north and east of here whose name meant Expert Warriors, knew that the mad were closer to the gods. It was this closeness that made them moonstruck. They could not but fail to be affected by what had happened. The torture of the Mother in the sea. The eating of the sky.

On the beach she could see one of the foreign traders. He had come from across the sea, far to the south, and had been the navigator on the ship. His name was strange and she was too exhausted to remember it. He wore a filthy woollen
blaidth
which had once been white. When she knew him on the ship, he had black dye painted around his eyes, a trimmed and lacquered dark beard, and a belly that told of a life of plenty. Now he was gaunt, his dark hair long and matted, his beard similarly wild. Paler than he had once been, his leathery, weather-beaten skin was still many shades darker than that of the inhabitants of her own land.

One of the moonstruck stood over him, raising a crude club made of driftwood with bits of stone, bone and shells embedded in it. Another was running towards the navigator; there were more behind that one. From further along the beach she could hear howls of pain, fear and madness. There were explosions of water as the moonstruck sprinted into the sea to reach the survivors.

Germelqart heard the screaming. He was sure it wasn’t a language. He smelled the stink of the moonstruck man before he’d even opened his eyes. All he could see was thin, muscular arms swinging the crude club plummeting towards his head.

The woman – little more than a girl, the navigator thought – collided with the moonstruck man. There was sickening crunch as the rock she swung caved in the man’s head. The pair of them collapsed into the sand. The man was muttering and sobbing, his head a new shape of red blood and white bone. Despite his madness, all the fight had left him.

The navigator watched as the wiry young woman pushed herself up off the sand on arms shaking with exertion. He recognised her as the warrior from the snake tribe. She was the one who knifed Ettin, the thing that had worn Hanno’s still-living head when Germelqart and Kush had dragged the creature off Britha. Germelqart was sure her name was Tangwen. The young huntress had travelled with Britha, the mad woman, the sacrificer, priestess, witch, warrior and demon.

He had watched her paint her short hair with lime to spike it, but wet it lay flat on her head. Her skin bore traces of the dyes the warriors of Ynys Prydein wore for war and ritual but the sea had washed most of them off. Her only garments were a soaking-wet tunic and a leather belt around her waist.

She drew a long, iron-bladed knife from a sheath as more of the moonstruck came sprinting across the sand towards them. She was saying something to him but he did not know enough of her language, and he was too exhausted and frightened to understand her.

A naked man skidded to a halt nearby. He danced around them, into the water, screaming imprecations as he drew patterns in his flesh with the knives he held in each hand. A large woman charged them, shrieking and wielding a skull filled with lime cement hanging from the end of wooden haft.

‘Get up! Run!’ Tangwen tried to scream at the navigator, but she barely had the strength to croak.

She watched the grotesque ripples in the flesh of the woman charging her. The sky was cloudless and blue above her, the sun bright and warm.

Tangwen staggered to her feet. She was surprised to see she had a knife in her hand, her axe long-gone now. The large woman swung at her. Somehow Tangwen ducked. The hand with a knife in it appeared to strike of its own accord and the blade scraped across the woman’s skull, cutting skin and flesh. Blood covered the moonstruck woman’s face, blinding her. This just made her laugh. The woman swung the skull-headed club and Tangwen ducked under another wild blow. The woman overextended herself, staggering past. Tangwen felt the impact run up her arms as she stabbed the knife into the back of the woman’s neck with enough force to sever her spine. The woman flopped to the ground like a dying fish.

More moonstruck were sprinting towards them across the beach.

Even if I had my bow
, Tangwen managed to think,
I still wouldn’t have the strength to draw it.

She wanted to give up now. Lie down. Sleep. Let the inevitable happen. She wanted death to carry her back to her Serpent Father in his crystal cave. Instead she stood over the body of the frightened navigator, bloody knife in hand. They had achieved so much. It wasn’t fair to die like this. She screamed so the gods could hear her anger.

Her cries were cut off as the man who had been cutting himself landed on her back, his weight sending them both crashing to the sand and rolling into the shallow water.

He was shamed. Unmanned. This small, tough woman raised in a cold, hard land was fighting, selling her life hard, whilst he lay shaking in his own water.

She hit the ground as one of the moonstruck jumped on her back. Germelqart’s hand wrapped itself around the haft of the barbaric skull-headed club the moonstruck woman had dropped. Then he was on his knees. Warm blood sprayed on his face as he brought the club down again and again onto the man’s head. He was screaming. The warrior woman had rolled from under her moonstruck attacker and was watching Germelqart beat the man’s head in.

He stopped, looking at the ruin he had made. The warrior woman had stood up, her knife at the ready, but she swayed as if she was ready to drop. Germelqart managed to stand, still holding the crude, horrible club. He was no warrior and never had been, but he was determined to follow the young woman’s example.

A group of islanders was running towards them. He wasn’t sure how many. In his exhaustion, he had forgotten how to count.