The Black Rose (2 page)

“The Dragon is the essential representation of Darkness: amongst the fluid collective, a single anchor point. Despite our pretensions, this world is still part of the Light—scarcely. Worshippers need a tangible individual icon to focus on.” The Emperor grinned. “And incidentally, you have seen
nothing
of the Darkness. Yet.”

Alex exhaled, dragging his gaze from the stone dragon's face to the malevolent humanoid one upon the throne. “So why am I here? What's this ‘offer'?”

“I am not going to conceal my aims for you, Mister Steele. By the time we are done, you will have changed sides in this war.”

“What?” Alex scoffed, equally amazed and amused. “You think you can make me abandon the Apollonians and join the Cult?” At this point, he actually laughed, for the first time since he'd arrived on this planet.

“What makes you think there are only two sides?”

Again Alex thought he saw grey smoke trace about the Emperor.

“I'm a prisoner of war. You're the one keeping me here. Why should I help you?”

The Emperor raised himself from the chair and turned to ponder the candles. “Because I know you better than you do. You are in denial about your past. You've convinced yourself that you belong as a minor agent for a group of vigilantes. I can show you your true potential.”

Alex leaned back farther, skeptical. He wasn't about to trust this creature, the leader of the organization he'd spent over a year fighting, and he certainly wasn't taken in by the talk about destiny. But back in the cell, the Emperor
had
known something he'd never disclosed to anyone still living. If nothing else, he needed to discover how the Emperor knew so much. And he might come across information important to the Apollonians in the process. He
would
be a double agent, just not the sort the Emperor had in mind. “Okay, I'll humor you. What were you thinking?”

The Emperor smirked and took Alex by the shoulder, steering him around the altar and onto the main flooring of the crossing. They passed under the vaulted arches and over the black rose, the organ music echoing high above.

Jack awoke with a start. He was, as he now knew he had been all through the nightmare, in his claustrophobic cabin aboard
The Golden Turtle.
His bunk took up an entire wall, raised to accommodate shelves and drawers underneath. An empty square table occupied a corner, and the only other fitting in the room was a tall wardrobe on the opposite wall. A small porthole near his head showcased only the deep gloom of the underwater world they traversed.

He clambered off his bed, his arms easily reaching the ceiling of the cabin. He sagged onto the carpeted floor, stretching out his neck.

Had he not been here, but perhaps back on Earth, he may well have dismissed the last month as some kind of mental breakdown. As it was, traveling in the company of two people who were, unequivocally, an elf and a dwarf made this considerably harder. In these last six weeks, he had been caught up in a sorcerer's attack on his hometown of Birchford, had been transported to another world, had come into contact with races of beings he'd thought existed only in myths and fairy tales, and had twice fought and defeated a giant demon lobster. And his newfound abilities to, amongst others, set things on fire, levitate objects, and generate light from nowhere ended any attempt to explain away his current predicament. He still couldn't quite understand how or why he, a fairly ordinary British teenager, had got into this situation.

When he'd finally been given an explanation for all this madness, it hadn't been disappointing in its magnitude. As far as he could tell, a war was currently being fought between the Apollonians, defenders of the Light, and the Cult of Dionysus, who were in the process of constructing a Dark alchemical superweapon called the Aterosa. Both sides were racing to discover the whereabouts of the Shards of the Risa Star, an extremely powerful object which, if reunited, seemed capable of shaping the outcome of this conflict.

In the times when he hadn't been working around the vessel or in conversation with Bál the dwarf and Sardâr the elf about the Apollonians' plans, four people had chiefly occupied Jack's thoughts. The first, of course, was his closest friend, Lucy. She, out of all who'd become caught up in this war, had been the most constant in her support of him. Their last parting had been heartfelt, and, ever since, he had been staving off the feeling that they should have stayed together. She was now on a parallel but separate journey, in search of a Shard of the Risa Star, alongside two other Apollonians, Hakim and Adâ, both elves, though how near or far away they had gone he did not know. He thought of her mostly because the two of them, if no one else, shared this situation: they had been brought from Earth against their will, had been flung into a world they didn't understand, and both faced the horrors of the Cult. And they had survived, which was no mean feat. There was also the fact that the two hadn't spent over a week apart in the last year. He missed her most of all and could be fairly certain she felt the same way.

Second was, until a few weeks ago, his only other friend, Alex. He had known Alex since his arrival at the orphanage when Jack was seven and he was ten, and the two had remained firm friends ever since. Alex had reappeared the night of the Cult's attack, having been absent from Birchford without explanation for eighteen months. As Jack and Lucy had later discovered, he had been gone not only from their town but from their
planet,
working with the Apollonians in their battle against the Cult. Barely hours back on Earth, Alex had been stabbed and kidnapped by the Cult and was now presumably held captive on the organization's elusive base world of Nexus.

In a solid third place was the captain of
The Golden Turtle,
Ruth Sparrow. Jack had met Ruth minutes after he had left Earth; it was she who had carried him and Lucy as passengers on her ship to an Apollonian base. That voyage had lasted only three days, and yet they had connected immediately. They were both orphans as far as they knew: he due to his mother's abandonment, she due to amnesia and imprisonment. Ruth was, right now, somewhere else on this world-traversing submarine, probably sleeping. That thought gave him an unusual amount of comfort.

Finally, with these three as miniature suns lighting the inside of his head, the fourth lurked in the shadows behind. Jack had so far met two priests of the Council of Thirteen, which governed the Cult of Nexus: Iago, an old enemy of Sardâr's who had joined the Cult to secure domination of their mutual home world of Tâbesh; and Icarus, about whom Jack now realized he knew next to nothing. It had been Icarus who had led the attack on Birchford, attempted to sacrifice Lucy to release a powerful demon,
and
kidnapped Alex. He had seemed to recognize Jack, and Jack remembered a feeling of déjà-vu when seeing him, as if of someone he had met but never really got to know. And after a brief glimpse into the Cult's plans, he knew the Emperor had assigned Icarus to find another Shard. This couldn't bode well for the Apollonians.

Jack rubbed his eyes. They were beginning to close again. The sweat had faded, and now he was getting cold. He clambered into his bunk. The conditions at his orphanage hadn't been great, considering the sparse funding, but they were considerably better than this.

He lay down and closed his eyes.

Ruth was falling into Darkness, suffocating. She twisted around. Behind her, she glimpsed where she had come from, a back alley constructed entirely from alchemical piping and stone slabs. Several windows high above glimmered with artificial light. The sky was wrought with the perpetual storm of this place, lightning splintering the billowing clouds. A portal of dark energy enwrapped her, some invisible force pulling her backwards through it. The image of the alleyway was disappearing, becoming smaller and smaller as if at the end of a telescope. Her senses were gradually shutting down: she could see nothing, barely breathe, hear only the stifling silence of the Darkness…

Ruth gasped and sat up in bed, drenched in sweat. She, too, was in a cabin of
The Golden Turtle,
though as captain she had considerably bigger quarters than Jack's. She swung her legs over the bed and dropped down, seating herself at the table bolted to the floor in the center of the room. She pressed a key on the table leg, and an overhead lamp cast an orange hue across the room.

She lay her forearm on the table, palm upwards. A tattoo, a stylized lion in black ink, was woven into her skin just below the elbow. This and the nightmare were the only remnants from her life before
The Golden Turtle.

Five years previously, she had awoken aboard the ship with no memory of her former life or how she had arrived there. The captain, Ishmael, had told her she'd been hauled out of the sea, unconscious, close to drowning. With nowhere to return to, she had been enlisted in the ship's crew and eventually adopted by Ishmael. It was only later, when she had come into contact with the Cult of Dionysus, that her recurring nightmare began to make sense. She had been imprisoned on Nexus but had somehow fallen or escaped into the Darkness and ended up in another world.

Ruth sat back and gazed up at the lantern's fiery pattern crisscrossing the metal ceiling. Jack, she knew, had had a similar family experience but without a parental figure like Ishmael as a guiding beacon at the end of it. She presumed Jack wanted to return to his home world, but she was secretly glad he was unable to for the time being. Her first proper talk with him, the night he had arrived on
The Golden Turtle,
had been the only time she had opened up to anyone but Ishmael. She considered seeing if he was awake now but dismissed the idea immediately. He wouldn't want to be disturbed at this time.

She stood, turned off the light, and went back to bed.

Jack awoke properly to a knock on the door a few hours later. It was Aonair, a crew member he vaguely knew.

“Sardâr wants you to get to the command deck. We're nearing our destination.”

Jack washed quickly, changed into new clothes, and made his way across the ship to the command deck. There was obviously no natural lighting here, as they were underwater, but soft lamps lining the wood-panelled corridors mimicked the cycle of day and night. He passed various crew members and eventually came to the double doors emblazoned with a golden turtle symbol.

This room was a large glassy dome, the head of the turtle, against which the dank water of their current passage pressed on all sides. Futuristic navigational machines lined the walls, operators sitting before the humming screens. In the center, on a lower level, a large oak table was bolted down, with a plethora of maps pinned to it. Three people stood around it. Ruth, adorned with her signature bandana, was directly opposite him; the elf Sardâr, Middle Eastern in complexion and wearing a tunic, studying one of the maps; and Bál the dwarf stood a little back from the others, distinctly out of place in his traveling gear.

Bál's first reaction to
The Golden Turtle
had been a mixture of wonder and gruffness. He came from a world, Thorin Salr, which roughly resembled Earth's Dark Ages. This ultrasophisticated technology had baffled Jack, so he could only imagine how Bál felt.