The Demi-Monde: Summer (9 page)

‘That was a long time ago.’

‘Nine years. And since then most of the nonFemme fighters chose to emigrate to NoirVille rather than volunteer to have their naturally perverse MALEvolent tendencies muted by the process of castration.’

Wysochi didn’t say a word but the expression on his face was very eloquent, obviously being of the opinion that given a choice between debollocking and relocating, most men would have been looking to secure the next berth on a barge heading to Cairo.

‘We did, however, attract many Femmes from outside the Coven who wished to be part of the Sublime Revolution that is HerEticalism.’

‘And now you’ve got an all-Femme army of just fifty thousand fighters.’

‘Correct, Preferred Male Wysochi, though there are a number of NoNs within the Officer Corps. ReverendFemme Dark – may ABBA bring her soul safe to her ancestors – did a fine job of reconstituting the Covenite Army. Her Amazon Regiments are reputed to be some of the finest in the whole of the Demi-Monde.’

Trixie nodded her agreement. ‘I inspected them yesterday morning. They’re well equipped and look very capable.’

‘But there’re only fifty thousand of them.’

‘Yes.’

‘That is why,’ continued Mao, ‘upon the tragic death of ReverendFemme Dark, Her Imperial Majesty Empress Wu, in her divinely inspired wisdom, appointed GeneralFemme Dashwood as Commander of the Army. Her Imperial Majesty consulted the iChing, which indicated that if the Coven was to defeat the ForthRight then it must put its trust in General-Femme Dashwood. It was, of course, a somewhat unexpected divination but then ABBA works in mysterious ways Her wonders to perform.’ Mao took a sip of water. ‘Yet, on reflection, ABBA’s guidance was not as perverse as it first appeared. As you yourself know, Preferred Male Wysochi, the General-Femme has great experience in leading an army of untrained recruits to victory over the ForthRight. Even as we speak, Femmes are rushing to enlist in the Free Femme Army of Resistance.’

‘Terrific,’ observed an obviously unimpressed Wysochi. ‘And I guess that the ForthRight will be so desperate for coal that it’ll throw all its forces at you.’

‘Yes,’ said Trixie quietly. ‘Observation balloons tell us that the ForthRight has ten divisions massed on the St Petersburg side of the Volga.’

‘Half a million men … nonFemmes.’

‘Give or take.’

‘Who’s commanding them?

‘Archie Clement.’

‘Shit, not him again. I was hoping someone would have shot him by now.’

This prompted a sardonic laugh from Trixie. ‘I tried: that’s why I spent all Spring in a Rangoon prison cell.’

‘Shame you missed, GeneralFemme: killing that bastard would be worth three months in jail of anybody’s time.’ Wysochi gave a discouraging shake of his head. ‘But here’s the problem: military lore has it that to be successful when you attack across a river, you need to outnumber the opposition by five to one. The ForthRight outnumbers you by ten to one, so I guess, to use military terminology, GeneralFemme, you’re fucked.’

‘Maybe not, Major. There are things which give me some grounds for optimism: the WarJunks of AdmiralNoN Zheng Heii are impressive, as are the rocket batteries managed by CommanderNoN Jiao Yu. And then there’s the Geek Fire—’

‘That is classified information, GeneralFemme, and should not be discussed with a nonFemme,’ warned Mao. ‘And might I remind you, Major, that we came here today to hear your advice, not to endure your scatological comments.’

‘Then my advice, Imperial Secretary, is to make sure that Archie Clement doesn’t take the Anichkov Bridge. If he does, then he’ll be able to transport his heavy equipment – especially his armoured steamers – into the Coven, and once he’s done that, then you can prepare your NoN arse to receive a non-Femme kicking.’

The NoN leant over the table and gimleted Wysochi with a hard stare. ‘Then you should pray to whichever pagan god you subscribe, Preferred Male Wysochi, that that does not happen, because if it does – if GeneralFemme Dashwood were to fail in the ABBA-given task of protecting the Coven – then it will go hard on you and your
gaijin
fighters … very hard indeed.’ Mao rose to his feet. ‘This meeting is over. I am commanded to attend an audience with Her Imperial Majesty in the Forbidding City.’

As a reluctant Trixie followed Mao out of the room, her mind whirred with possibilities. Nodding goodbye to Wysochi, she made the silent pledge that, given a chance, she would shake herself – and her WFA fighters – free of these monsters.

The low, ominous drone of the great horn echoed across the emptiness of the Hub alerting the world that a new order had come, signalling – though the Fragiles in their stupidity did not yet realise it – that Lilith had returned.

The girl who had once been Ella Thomas stood motionless, allowing herself to revel for just an instant in the magnificence of the occasion. This must, she decided, be how St Paul felt when he had his revelation on the road to Damascus, when he understood that he had been chosen by God to lead the world to …

To what?

To Perfection. Yes, to the Perfection that had once been snatched from the world’s grasp by a delinquent Nature. But this time there would be no mistake, this time she would make HumanKind perfect.

Now everything was set fair for her to have all of the Demi-Monde kneel before her. She had had Doge Catherine-Sophia eliminated and had assumed control of Venice. She had made alliance with Shaka Zulu – his scruples about aligning himself with a woeMan swept away by his greed to possess the secrets of Aqua Benedicta – and together Venice and NoirVille could outface any enemy. But even more importantly, she had control of the Column of Loci, which would allow her to rekindle the power sleeping in the Temple of Lilith … and to conquer the Real World.

Only the question of Vanka Maykov remained unsettled.

The
enigma
of Vanka Maykov, more like. Thinking of Maykov gave her pause. In an earlier incarnation she had loved him and it was an affection that still nagged at her soul. But Lilith wasn’t Ella Thomas; Lilith was divine, Lilith was implacable, Lilith had no time for love. So she would use all her power to erase her memory of the man and, hopefully, any feelings for him that might still be lingering in her heart.

So resolved, she took a deep calming breath, stepped from gangplank of the Doge’s state barge, the Bucintoro, onto the lush grass of the HubLand and then raised her eyes to gaze along the Divine Way that led to the Temple of Lilith. The Way was invisible to the naked eye – overgrown as it was by a thousand years of neglect – but she knew that only inches beneath her feet lay the sacred Mantle-ite paved road that, in days gone by, worshippers coming to the Temple had used to protect themselves from the ravenous nanoBites. And as the Mantle-ite was invulnerable to decay and to the ravages of time, it would still
be there, just as she remembered it, a raised central walkway flanked by two equally wide but lower walkways. As was her right, she chose the central path, the holiest of the three. In times before remembering it had been the Grigori who had walked to her right and the Kohanim to her left, but those days were long gone.

She took the first, tentative step onto the Way. Such was the significance of this simple act that for a second she was overcome by emotion and was forced to stop as the voices of her long-dead sisters whispered in her mind. It took a moment for her to recover her poise. She had come to the Demi-Monde as an ordinary eighteen-year-old girl from New York, but had discovered that she was really something very different.

Very, very different
.

The Demi-Monde had awakened her to what she once had been. And with that awakening had come the realisation that she had a destiny, a destiny to lead HumanKind towards a new future. Ella Thomas was no more. The Lady IMmanual was no more. Now there was only Lilith, a Lilith who would soon cause the reincarnation of the Lilithi …
Homo perfectus
.

And the irony was that it was Bole who had provided her with the means of achieving this resurrection. She stifled a complacent smile. Bole’s threat in sending her twin brother Billy to the Demi-Monde had been very eloquent: perform more miracles, tamper with the Demi-Monde again, and Billy would be killed. But delivering Billy to her had been Bole’s greatest mistake. He had sent Billy as a warning, but all his presence had done was give her the opportunity to make the Lilithi – the Priestesshood of Lilith – whole again, to enable them to regain all their powers. What Bole hadn’t realised was that he had sent her the very thing that would make her ascendancy to power inevitable … the blood of a Dark Charismatic.

She began to walk along the Divine Way, savouring the
moment, imagining the slick, warm Mantle-ite hidden under the soles of her bare feet, remembering how she had walked along this same path all those thousands of years ago when the world – the Real World – was young. The Way stretched straight and true for nine hundred yards from the Wheel River to the doors of the Temple. She walked slowly, ignoring the rain that beat down on her, ignoring the ululations of her priestesses who followed in her wake, ignoring everything, simply lost to the memories of a time long ago as they were rekindled within her.

Closer now, she could see that the Temple was overgrown by vines and desecrated by a patina of dirt, but despite this neglect, the Mantle-ite walls still glowed green in the moonlight. It was a magnificent, brooding edifice to the power of Lilith.

At the end of the Divine Way the three walkways separated, each leading to one of a trio of enormous doors set in the side of the Temple, each of the doors firmly shut, their bronze locks green and corroded, showing that they had not been open in centuries … that they would never be opened again except at the command of Lilith. Over the door to the right was the Valknut, the sign of the Grigori; over the one to the left was the five-pointed star of the Kohanim; and over the central one – the Great Entrance – was the sign of
laguz
sinister crossed with
laguz
dexter, the symbol of Lilith.

Ascending the broad stairway leading to the Great Entrance, she was suffused by an almost overwhelming sensation of completeness. It was as though she had gone through her life knowing something was missing but not quite sure what it was, that understanding tantalisingly out of reach.

No longer.

As she walked through the massive propylaeum – the huge archway that decorated the Great Entrance – towards the sealed doors, those long-forgotten memories of the lives of all her
forebears came flooding back. Now she was complete, now she was truly Lilith reborn.

She made a silent pledge that soon the Temple would look just as she remembered it from all those thousands of years before … that soon its Mantle-ite walls would be scrubbed and clean. Then it would be truly a Temple fit for a goddess, a Temple that symbolised her power and her might. But even dirty and neglected, it was magnificent, each of its walls six hundred and sixty yards long and one hundred and eighty high, with ninety-six fluted columns holding up the massive architraves embossed with scenes from the life of Lilith. It was like the Parthenon writ large … but then the Parthenon itself had been just a muddled memory of the grandeur of the Temple that had stood in the lost land Real World scholars had dubbed Urheimat but which she knew better as Atlantis.

Yes, ABBA had created a perfect replica of the Temple she had once presided over in the Real World. It was over eight thousand years since she had last stood before these doors, but then she had stood there as the Goddess Lilith, as Mother Nature …

A hugely inappropriate title.

Lilith might have conquered evolution, she might have conquered death, but she had never been able to control Nature. And in a day and a night Nature had unleashed her fury and sent the deluge that had destroyed the civilisation of the Lilithi and thrown those of her people who survived, bemused and leaderless, out into the world.

No, she had never commanded Nature. Only ABBA could do that.

A tear slid slowly down her cheek as the remembrance of the grief caused by that destruction coursed through her. Even now at a distance of eight millennia she was still crippled by the anguish of that terrible day, numbed by the weight of the collective
grief of her sisters and daughters and wracked by guilt. She still cursed herself for her hubris, for her inability to see how the world was changing.

She shook her head: this was not the time for recrimination or remorse. This was the time for her to reclaim her place in the world.

She came to stand before the doors that had denied entry to the Temple for a thousand years and reached up towards the six rectangular shapes set into the wall at the door’s left-hand side. With a deft flick of her wrist she pushed the first of the shapes upwards and inwards until it clicked out to lie in the palm of her hand. This, the first part of the key, was six inches long and an inch thick with a two-inch notch cut out of its centre. It took her less than a minute to release the five other parts and to assemble them into the shape of Lilith’s symbol. The key was complete.

It was this puzzle that had kept the Temple undisturbed since the Confinement.

She took another deep breath, trying to quell her excitement, then placed the key into the slot set to the side of the door and twisted. There was the sound of sliding weights and then gradually the great Mantle-ite door levered itself open.