Entangled (23 page)

‘There’s more than one of you?’

‘We are legion. But this is talk for another time. I have work for you now.’

Leoni could feel herself getting annoyed: ‘You still haven’t asked my permission to involve me in any of this … work.’

‘I do not need to ask your permission.’

‘Ha!’ Leoni was amazed at her own boldness: ‘You bet your ass you do!’

The Angel smiled: ‘You misunderstand me. I do not mean to disrespect your sovereignty. It’s true I have
chosen
you for this work – and I did that without your consent. But the nature of the task is such that it would be pointless for you to undertake it unless you accede to it wholeheartedly.’

Leoni was trying to figure out exactly what this meant. ‘So your plans don’t involve forcing me to do anything?’

‘I could not do so even if I wished to. You are my choice for this task. But if you do not accept then I will choose another.’

‘What made you choose me?’ Leoni asked.

‘You are human, you are female and you live in the twenty-first century. These were all essential prerequisites.’

‘Hey, I’ve got news for you! Women hold up half the sky. There are about four billion of us. What makes me different?’

‘You were abandoned at birth. Your first five years were spent in an orphanage …’

‘Nobody wanted me …’

‘But at last you were adopted …’

‘I’d given up hope. Longing to have a mother and father, seeing the other kids go off to happy homes – it all hurt too much. Just after I was five my dreams came true. For the next three years I thought I was in heaven. Then I found out I’d been adopted by the parents from hell.’

‘An apt metaphor. And this, finally, is why I have chosen you. You were adopted to serve as an offering to Jack, and Jack is my enemy.’

‘An offering?’ Leoni repeated the words, feeling dazed. ‘I don’t think I understand.’

‘Every moment of your life after your adoption was mapped out as a sacrifice to Jack. He delights in the destruction of human potential
and the undoing of innocence. Your demolition was your parents’ gift to him.’

‘But why? Why would they do that?’

‘He demands such a sacrifice of all his followers. Some are ordered to kill a child, amidst blood and fear, in some abominable way. Others are required to inflict bewildering mental and physical tortures first, sometimes extended over periods of years. This was what happened to you.’

‘So that means my parents are Jack’s followers?’

‘Yes. And there are others like them everywhere – bad people he has spoken to in dreams, good people he has corrupted and subverted. A secret cult has begun to form and its members worship him as their god. Already they number thousands. They occupy positions of power and wealth in their nations, and every one of them has offered a child like you to Jack.’

The words sounded true and at the same time made no sense. ‘I don’t even know who Jack is,’ Leoni said.

‘Do you
want
to know?’ the Angel asked.

‘Of course I want to know!’

In the lap of her scarlet robes the Angel still held the little device with its fold-up screen and control panel. Now she turned a second dial – not the one she’d used to adjust the sky – and the screen burst into life with a kaleidoscopic display of rotating patterns and colours. ‘Look into the screen,’ she commanded, ‘and I will show you Jack.’

Leoni had to obey. The patterns within the screen opened up into a rushing, churning vortex of sound and light and she felt her consciousness fly out of her body into the maelstrom. Once more she had the sense of passing through a tunnel –
Alice down the rabbit hole
, she thought – and then WHOOMF! she was back in a place that felt like Planet Earth, under a single sun, standing close to a huge crowd of naked, brutish, pale-skinned men armed with crude but lethal-looking weapons of stone, wood and bone.

At first Leoni feared they might be able to see her – perhaps in the same way that the machine elves had seen her? – but it soon became obvious she was as invisible to these weird nudists as she had been to her parents when she’d approached them in the out-of-body state.

Increasing in confidence, she slipped unnoticed into the crowd, taking time to scrutinise the wild appearance of the men. Almost all of them
were blonds with shaggy shoulder-length hair, electric-blue eyes, and teeth filed to sharp points. They were lean and muscular, built like prizefighters, and their bodies were criss-crossed with scars. Slung across their backs, almost like an item of uniform, each of them carried three short spears and a peculiar wooden baton, about two feet long, with a handle of antler at one end and a sort of spur or hook, also of antler, attached to the other end.

Who were these people? Some kind of Caucasian survivalist cult from Hell? Many wore bones through their noses and necklaces of what looked like human teeth – and that was a sight you didn’t see often, even in LA. All had crazed expressions, their blue eyes blazing, peering upward with rapt intent, and she sensed about them a tremendous and terrifying power.

That was when Leoni began to realise just how big the crowd really was and that she was in the midst of
thousands
of men gathered in disciplined ranks in a great circle around the perimeter of a low hill. They were staring at a squat shelter built on its summit, open on all sides but roofed at a height of about seven feet with a grid of narrow wooden slats. Then they all shouted at once – a deafening, guttural, stomach-churning yell – as a young man appeared in front of the shelter and stood with his hands outstretched to receive their salute.

What sort of person could command the approbation of an army such as this?

Enjoying the freedom of her invisible aerial body, Leoni soared up to the summit to find out.

Tied fast to stakes ten paces apart, Rill and Hond faced one another in the centre of the woodland clearing. Rill was slumped forward against his bonds, silent now, his entrails spilling out in bloody coils from his stomach cavity, while the savage who had disembowelled him was striding towards Hond armed with a long flint knife.

Ria felt a lightning-bolt of energy jolt down her right arm as she let fly with the first of the five quartz hunting stones Merina had given her.

The deadly little egg was balanced and streamlined to perfection, but still it was a tricky throw because the furious crowd of naked braves continued to dance around the captives and their executioner. There were only two or three paces between each of the cavorting, rushing men and Ria’s shot, taken on the run, had to pass through one of these fast-shifting gaps and strike down a moving target over a distance of a hundred paces.

The whirl of the dance obscured her view, but she heard a satisfying double
clunk!
– something like the sound of an axe biting into a tree trunk – as the missile bounced into the advancing brave’s naked ankles. Still five paces away from Hond, he tumbled and fell head over heels. In the process she was pleased to see he had impaled his left hand with the flint knife he held in his right.

He didn’t cry out, and an instant later, with an athletic bound, he was standing again – this time locking his gaze onto Ria with such force that she felt it like a blow to the face.

He was a fearsome giant of a man, bigger even than the biggest of the Uglies. Enormous knots of muscle stood out on his broad shoulders and narrow waist, and a huge penis and hairy testicles dangled between his thighs.

Ria wasn’t afraid.

As she hurtled across the sunlit clearing towards him – eighty paces, seventy, sixty – what she felt was rage and remorse.

Above all, remorse.

For she could not escape the conclusion that the terrible events unfolding around her were her fault. Her brothers must have come out in search of her when she’d failed to return the night before. They were superb trackers and had followed her trail as far as this forest.

What they couldn’t have known was that a band of ferocious killers, who’d just discovered the bodies of four of their scouts, awaited them there.

And now poor Rill was dead.

At fifty paces, as though responding to a silent signal, all the dancing warriors stopped in their tracks and turned in unison to glare at her.

Ria skidded to a halt too. She’d lost the advantage of surprise and would throw better from a standstill than on the run.

Her brother’s murderer raised his transfixed hand in her direction and withdrew the blade. There was a spurt of his own blood and the unmistakable rasp of flint grinding against wet bone. He straightened, showing no weakness, and intensified his weird stare at Ria. At this distance she could see his eyes. In stark contrast to his pale gore-smeared skin, they were a startling and disconcerting bright blue.

He shook his shaggy hair, tilted back his head and began to laugh. A moment later the other twenty members of his gang joined in, opening their mouths wide and baring their pointed teeth. They all had the same mad blue eyes and the sound they made was like a pack of cave hyenas squabbling over a rotting carcass.

Summoning up all her concentration and strength, Ria threw her second stone. She could see from the surprise on her adversary’s face that he hadn’t expected this – least of all from her left hand – and she watched the missile connect hard with the side of his skull just behind the temple. His raucous laughter was cut off, his eyes rolled up in their sockets, and he stumbled, dropped to his knees and slumped forward on his face in the grass.

That was when spears the size of small trees began flying through the air from all directions, thudding into the naked bodies of the Illimani. There was a great roar and the spears were followed by a throng of Uglies, the entire escort of fifty braves who had accompanied Ria from Secret Place, wielding their clunky stone axes and hulking wooden clubs.

Pandemonium broke out amidst the Illimani, suddenly outnumbered
more than two to one. Men fell, were knocked aside, hacked down. None of them ran. They fought as a pack, like wolves, with stunning ferocity. But for a brief interval no one was paying any attention to Ria who was soon straddling the hairy body of the Illimani giant she had felled.

He was conscious but dazed.

Ria stooped, wrenched his flint knife from his grasp, rolled him onto his back, and scythed off his cock and balls. As he struggled to his feet, jetting blood and bellowing in horror, she slit open his stomach from crotch to breastbone and stuffed his severed genitals into his gaping mouth. ‘That’s for Rill,’ she screamed.

She darted forward and cut the ropes shackling Hond to the stout wooden stake.

The marks of torture were everywhere on his body. ‘Can you fight, brother?’ she asked.

Hond dodged a spear thrust from an Illimani brave who leapt out at them from the melee, snatched the weapon from its owner, reversed it and brought the man down with a jab through the eye. ‘I can fight,’ he said.

Ria tightened her grip on the long flint knife and stood back to back with Hond as three more warriors converged on them.

The summit of the little hill was flattened into a platform about thirty feet across, and what was going on there was much more complicated than it had looked from the ground.

The most striking part of it was the naked young man standing with his hands outstretched as though to receive an offering from the massed ranks of armed men below. Up close he was beautiful – not just good-looking but
beautiful
– in a way that managed to be both strong and effeminate, mysterious and tempting, wistful and joyous, dangerous and intoxicating, all at the same time.