The Ironclad Prophecy (37 page)

He turned his attention to the wall. He could see the glyphs and the blank, unfilled space. He stood before it and concentrated. He inhaled, slowly and deeply. As he did, faint colours began to permeate the surface of the vacant space, like an after image. There was something here; a scent message impregnated into the wall. With each purposeful breath, the colours grew stronger, and began to take on form in the space between him and the wall, hovering before his eyes, taking a shape he had come to recognise, a base note, on which the whole composition was built, pungent and overwhelming, one of the first words he had learnt in his synesthetic vocabulary.

“Fear,” croaked Mathers. “Something is coming.” He reeled back as the next aromatic note almost overwhelmed him. “Here!” he gasped. Another stringent note subsumed and washed this one away; a lingering top note that persisted after the others had faded. “Fear. Flee.”

“What the hell is that, some kind of warning?” asked Atkins.

Chandar stepped forwards, its mandibles ticking together as it forced the urman words out through its mouth palps. “No, you misunderstand. It is merely history, a few scraps of scent from the past.” It turned to Mathers, its clawed middle limbs open, its antennae stumps jerking. “How is this possible? Urmen are scent-blind. How is it that you can decipher the chemical commentaries of the Ones? This is unforeseen, this is beyond wonder.”

Mathers threw his arms wide. “It is a gift from Skarra, the gift of tongues.”

Chandar let out a long low hiss, but its eyes fell on the empty hip flask in Mathers’ hand and it fell silent, lost in thought.

Mathers felt the overwhelming scent of fear from the message rousing him to panic. He felt the urge to flee, and might well have done had not a spasm in his stomach sent him doubling over as ripples of pain washed though him. He rode each agonising wave until they subsided and, with them, the feeling of fear.

“Something, I don’t know what, was coming. It arrived. They fled,” he said, still panting though the pain.

“That’s it?” said Atkins, unimpressed.

Mathers stood, steadying himself against the wall as he pulled himself to his full height. “Can you do better, Corporal?”

“No sir. But we already know about the dulgur.”

“
If
that is what they were talking about, Corporal.”

A
SHOT ECHOED
around the chamber. It came from the concourse. “Gutsy, Mercy, stay here. Keep an eye on that lot.”

Atkins ran to the opening and peered round, ready for anything. Anything but what he found.

He was greeted by Pot Shot with an anguished looked on his face. “It’s Prof.”

Prof? Atkins couldn’t see with the others gathered around but, as he approached, they parted. Between them he could see a large pile of rubble, and protruding from behind it he could make out a bare right foot. That was all he needed to see.

“Oh, Prof.” Atkins groaned. “You stupid sod.”

Prof lay slumped against a pile of debris. He had discarded his puttee, boot and sock to one side, his bayonet to the other. The top half of his skull had been blown away and his brains splattered over the rubble behind him. His rifle lay along his chest. Nellie knelt by him, but there was nothing she could do.

“He was sobbing quietly for a while. I thought it best to leave him, then I heard him say ‘sorry,’” said Pot Shot. “I never thought –”

Suicide. Not always easy for a soldier. Some just stuck their heads above the parapet and waited for a German sniper. Others, well. The barrel of the Enfield was too long. You couldn’t just stick the muzzle in your mouth and use your finger to pull the trigger. You had to take your boot and sock off, then use your big toe instead.

For some of the Tommies, the only thing that kept them going was the fact that they might find a way home. There had been a flurry of suicides when they’d first arrived, and every so often they found another poor bugger who’d found he couldn’t take it anymore, in a trench or a dugout. With the discovery of the Bleeker Party came the realisation that that there was no way home, that they were stranded on this hell world. It was just too much.

“You know the routine, Porgy,” said Atkins quietly. “Paybook and disc. Redistribute his bombs, rations and ammunition.”

Nellie shook her head slowly in disbelief. “Why would he do that?”

Gutsy put a big fatherly arm round her and steered her away from the sight. “He’d just had enough, love. He hasn’t been quite the same since Nobby died. I think perhaps finding them emigrants was the last straw. It takes something like that, when you’re a long way from home.”

Although there was no love lost between them, the tank crew hung back, and gave 1 Section the space to briefly mourn their dead comrade.

It was then Nellie caught sight of Alfie. Her mouth formed a silent ‘o’ of shock when she saw his eyes, but he shook his head to dissuade her from any action. She relented, reluctantly, and only for the moment.

They piled blocks of rubble and debris over the body, burying Prof where he lay. Chalky muttered a hurried prayer before they moved on.

Atkins was angry now. If it hadn’t been for Mathers and his blasted quest, Prof might still be alive. But he had his orders. If they were going to get Mathers and the tank back, they had to kill this blasted creature. Atkins turned to the masked Tank Commander. “Right, let’s get this done. Which way, Lieutenant?”

Mathers paused for a moment, considering the options, then pointed to one of the passages leading off the concourse. “That way.”

A
TKINS AND
1 Section fell in behind him. Mathers nodded, and the tank crew brought up the rear as they began to descend into the edifice’s subterranean levels.

Nellie fell back, snatching a chance to talk to Alfie.

“What have they done to you?” she hissed angrily.

“Not here,” he begged her. In the dark, his fingers found hers. He squeezed her hand to placate her. “It’s all right, it will pass.”

She glanced at him with suspicion.

“It’ll pass,” he reassured her.

Frank gave Alfie a shove from behind. “No fraternising with the enemy.”

He let go of her hand, taking comfort in her soft golden glow, as she returned to Napoo’s side. She glanced back, searching for reassurance. He offered a smile for her sake.

Small galleries and chambers led off the curved passage at regular intervals. They searched each set. Atkins barely noticed. None of it mattered. It was all dry as dust, and dead, just as they would be. All he could think about was Flora, how he would never see her again. Never smell her perfume again, or see their child growing up. His child. He imagined the life he had lost, married, with the child, little William. He could feel his weight in his arms and smell its hair. See his smile as he recognised him. Gone, all gone.

Atkins became aware that someone was talking to him.

“Only,” Gazette was saying. “Chalky’s found something. I think you ought to see it.”

Atkins looked at Chalky. “Show me.”

Emboldened, Chalky took the lead and showed him a tunnel running off the main passage. Chandar accompanied him. Chalky pointed to the far wall of the chamber. “It were down here. I was just checking and saw it glinting in the torch light. There.”

Atkins saw the glint on the floor by the wall. He walked over, sank down on his haunches, and picked it up.

“What is it?” asked Chandar.

Attached to a small scrap of bloodstained khaki cloth was a brass button. Atkins examined it, rubbing it clean with the pad of his thumb. There upon the button, in relief, was a bomb, fuse aflame, with crossed rifles and a crown, all cradled in a wreath. It was the crest of the Pennine Fusiliers.

He blinked and looked up at Gazette. “Check your uniform buttons,” he said, his voice imbued with a sense of urgency.

After a little fumbling, it became clear that they all had the requisite number.

“It’s not from any of us,” reported Gutsy.

Atkins hardly dared think it. There was only one man who might have made it this far. One man.

Gutsy stared at him. “Christ, you don’t think –”

Atkins nodded. “Jeffries. Who the hell else could it be?”

S
KARRA CONTINUED TO
mutter in Mathers’ head. In the confines of the edifice, his heightened awareness was flooded with new sensory details. The information was pressing in on him and he was powerless to stop it.

“I can see him,” said Mathers, taking the bloodstained scrap and staring fixedly at it.

“Who?” asked Atkins.

Mathers waved the button at him. “Jeffries.”

The corporal stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“I can
see
him, his scent on it. I should be able to track his scent trail if there is any left to follow.”

“You can do that?”

Mathers looked at the chatt. “Skarra tells me I can.”

He was aware of the chatt watching him intently as he concentrated on the scrap of cloth. Using the shapes, sounds and textures that danced around it, Mathers was able, with some effort, to draw Jeffries’ scent out of the surrounding kaleidoscopic mists. He watched as vaporous tones of purples and reds coalesced and evaporated rapidly around each other, trying to confuse and deceive. They shifted and changed, into blues and yellows, like a snake shedding skin after skin, as it sought to slip beyond even his heightened perception, but he held it fast in his attention. Under the haze of stale, sour human aromas, he had his base note now; that part of a man that was immutable, unchangeable, distinctive. It resolved itself into a thin green thread of scent that he could follow.

He had no doubt that others in his crew, Clegg or Perkins even, who had received such a concentrated dose of petrol fruit juice recently, might see something of what he saw, but they lacked the education, the intuition, to make the connections he was now experiencing.

Fascinated, he began to walk haltingly, following the fragile drifting airborne trail, constantly checking it with the control scent of the khaki scrap. The others followed at a distance. Slowly, he became attuned to it, to the dancing particles of scent, sweat and blood. At first, it was nothing more than a scent echo, a faint trail hanging in the air, then it began to take on a phantasmagorical shape. Indistinct at first, it coalesced into the faint, ethereal figure of an infantry officer. Hardly daring to breathe, he followed the redolent wraith as it continued its journey. It entered a series of chambers. He watched as it crossed to a wall and crouched down, inspecting something there.

Mathers stepped closer to see.

As if sensing him, the wraith turned. Mathers recognised it as Jeffries. It looked directly at him. A disdainful smile spread across its face as it stepped towards him. With the guilty start of an eavesdropper caught red-handed, Mathers cried out and lurched back, out of reach of the apparition as it advanced on him, and lost his concentration.

In that moment, it seemed to him that Jeffries gesticulated and, upon that gesticulation, proceeded to evaporate until there was nothing left of his incorporeal form but a faint drifting trail suspended in the air.

Mathers reeled from the chamber. “He was here. He was reading... something on the wall.”

A wave of pain rippled out from his abdomen, through his torso, up his spine and down through his limbs, causing him to double over. He’d been away from the tank for too long. He fumbled for his hip flask. He’d forgotten it was empty. He grunted with frustration and pain, pulling his splash mask and helmet from his head, and sucking in great lungfuls of air. The plaques on his face were now red and livid and his eyes, iridescent swirls on black, seemed unfocused and inhuman.

“Easy sir, I’ve got you,” said Jack Tanner.

Following her instincts, the FANY approached the group, her eyes catching Alfie’s as she passed. “Let me help,” she said.

Cecil stood up, held out his arm, and refused to let her pass. “It’s all right, miss,” he said belligerently. “We’ve got him. He don’t need nobody else.”

“She can help, sir,” Alfie insisted.

Mathers turned his head and looked at him through the slits of his splash mask.

“No, Perkins, you know she can’t.”

L
EAVING
M
ATHERS TO
the care of his crew, Atkins took a torch and pushed past them with impatience into the chamber. Holding it high, he could see the markings on the wall. They were not like the chatt glyphs. With a swell of frustration, he realised they weren’t in a language he could read either. He couldn’t make any sense of it. But it
was
familiar. He brushed his hand briefly over the scratched graffiti with curiosity. It looked like the coded script he had seen in Jeffries’ journal, the one Lieutenant Everson pored over obsessively. Then he saw something he did recognise. His brow furrowed. He fished in his top pocket and pulled out a folded piece of tattered paper. The leader of every patrol had one, Everson insisted upon it. He unfolded it to reveal a carefully copied symbol. He compared the two now. There was no doubt.