Conflagration (3 page)

Three riders from Neally’s regiment galloped past, and Neally leaned impulsively forward and kissed Cordelia. “Something’s happening. I have to go.”

He turned the bay, and put his heels to it. The horse started forward, lunging as though eager to be on the move. Cordelia was always amazed how the mounts of the cavalry were so eager for the fight, when the noise and carnage of the battlefield should have repelled all of their natural instincts. Neally turned in the saddle for a final wave. His saber slapped against the bay’s flank. The image froze in Cordelia’s mind like a still picture. His schoolboy grin, and his broad back in its khaki tunic, with scarlet shoulder boards. She swallowed hard at the sickening realization that the chance existed she would never see him again, and that would be how her memory would always see him. She wasn’t in love with Tom Neally, but he was fun. A threat of tears constricted her throat. The gray gelding seemed to sense her unease and again pawed at the ground.

“Easy, damn it. We’ll be on the move ourselves soon enough.”

In the pocket of her uniform jacket, she had a pair of the new sunglasses from London, the ones with the round, dark blue lenses. She quickly put them on.

ARGO

A voice called from behind him. “Major?”

Argo Weaver didn’t turn. “What is it, Riordan?”

He knew the voice, and he didn’t bother to look round. The question was inevitable, and it was impossible to give Riordan the slip. “Should you be all the way out here on your own, young sir?”

Argo sighed. “No, I shouldn’t be all the way out here on my own, but I’m not on my own, am I? I have you following my every move.”

The rotund Sergeant of Horse spurred up beside him and reigned in his mount. “If you fancy going for a gallop, boy, you only have to tell me.”

There were not too many Sergeants of Horse who would address a major as “boy,” even a somewhat spurious major like Argo Weaver, but Will Riordan was one of the few. The man rode with ease. It was walking that created problems for him. He had been injured at the Battle of the Potomac when a gun carriage had overturned on top of him, fracturing his hip, and that was why he was now assigned to keep an eye on Argo, and see that he stayed out of trouble. Since the Army of Albany had started south, Argo had tried many times to duck the ever-present eye of Sergeant Riordan, but he had never succeeded. The man was as tenacious as a terrier.

“What the hell do you think’s going to happen to me, Will?”

“We don’t know that, do we, Major? And that’s why the brass have me following after you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Sure you can, but why take the chance? There’s old campaigners who’ve fallen foul of a Mosul booby trap. The bastards are damned clever.”

Each of The Four had been assigned a personal guardian, a minder for the advance into what had previously been enemy-held territory. Their strange collective command of the paranormal and their ability to penetrate and operate within other realities made them an important factor in the Albany war effort. “I mean, we can’t have you running round loose and taking the risk of running into a pod of Dark Things, or some sneaky Mosul rearguard.”

All of The Four found this imposed caution irksome. At first, a great deal of pressure had been brought to bear not to allow them to go south with the army at all. Many of the civilian politicians and a few of the generals had wanted them to remain in Albany, supposedly out of harm’s way. After the long winter of grueling training, and the exploration of their powers that had, on occasion, proved close to mind-snapping, none of them was inclined to be left back with the baggage. They had made vocal protests to Yancey Slide and anyone else in authority who would listen. They were trained and combat-hardened. They had held the underground tunnel during the Battle of the Potomac and they had saved the King from the last ditch assault of the Mothmen during the investiture ceremony that had followed. If the war was moving south, what possible reason was there for Albany’s most effective paranormal asset to stay behind under wraps? Cordelia had finally made a personal appeal to no less than Prime Minister Jack Kennedy. Cordelia had her own, slightly mysterious, direct line to the Prime Minister. Rumors had long been whispered about an ancient affair between Kennedy and Cordelia’s mother. Whatever the truth behind the gossip, she seemed to have the required influence. Kennedy had instructed that they should ride with the army, and, at that point, the argument had ceased, leaving only an insistence from all sides that they should be afforded round-the-clock protection.

Cordelia had also been the first one to balk at the constant for-their-own-good surveillance. On the march down to Richmond, she had been assigned a skinny, masculine RWA corporal, who rode a rawboned, bad-tempered mare that made them two of a kind. Cordelia had, however, become so adept at giving the woman the slip that Slide had devised the ruse of putting a young cavalry captain called Tom Neally in charge of her safety and welfare. He and Cordelia had immediately become lovers, which made Neally’s assignment considerably easier. The two of them had been fucking each other’s brains out every night since the army had passed Richmond. Cordelia actually believed she was being the soul of discretion, and she had everyone fooled, but the truth was that most of the high command, plus a majority of their fellow officers, were well aware of what was going on. Argo knew from months of experience that Cordelia could be totally carried away by illusions of her own excessive cleverness.

Raphael and Jesamine, the other two members of The Four, seemed less bothered by the watch that was kept on them. Very little seemed to bother Raphael. The taciturn and withdrawn Hispanian had been a Mosul conscript the previous fall, and Argo could only assume that just about anything would be acceptable after being dragged from his home when barely in his teens, beaten and bullied through Mosul boot camp, and then shipped across the Northern Ocean in an ironclad troopship to serve as cannon fodder in the American war. Through the winter, Argo and Raphael had trained together, bunked together, and even, on a couple of occasions, drunk themselves stupid together, but Argo still did not feel that he really knew his young companion. It may have been a legacy of Raphael having served in Hassan IX’s Provincial Levies, or maybe just a facet of his deep and complex nature, but a part of his character seemed to be permanently concealed, even to those who were supposed to be closest to him. He drew in his sketch pad and said little, and no overtures or encouragement seemed able to change that.

Argo could hardly say that he did not know Jesamine. They had started sleeping together almost as soon as the two of them had joined the ranks of Albany, and, although he was loath to admit such a thing openly, she had been his first extended relationship and only the second woman he had ever bedded. Although she was less than a year older than him, the nightmare experience she had suffered as a Mosul prostitute and the concubine of a brutal Teuton colonel had left her with a wealth of carnal experience he might never equal. She had been his erotic mentor, teaching him lessons, and raising him to heights of pleasure that had left him awed. They had shared a hundred secrets and a thousand intimacies, and, for a time, Argo had worshiped her huge dark eyes, her lithe, honey-colored body, and long dark hair, but she, too, seemed to keep a part of her mind closed off. Argo suspected, though, that the same could be said about him. He knew that he had never revealed everything about himself to Jesamine, even at the height of their shared passion. This may well have been a result of also having lived under the harsh rule of the Mosul invaders, when so much had to be concealed just in order to survive, and it could also have been the reason that Cordelia, who had never lived that way, chaffed so hard under the current surveillance while he, Jesamine, and Raphael were more able to take it in their stride.

Jesamine had also taught Argo to drink, passing on the fruits of her long experience, when alcohol had been the easiest and most available way to provide a little insulation between herself and her innate revulsion at being a chattel of the conquerors. At first the drunken nights had been fun—high as kites, rolling and sliding together in bed or elsewhere, their bodies slick with mingled sweat—but then the training of The Four had started, and the affair had ended. Argo and Jesamine had parted on the specific orders of Yancey Slide, their inhuman mentor, but Argo and Jesamine had always known this was the way that it would be. All of The Four knew from experience that sexual energy was one of the metaphysical triggers of their power, and an exclusive romance between two of them simply could not be if they were to function as was expected of them. Knowledge, and the demands of what they had become in this world and the Other Place, did not make the separation any easier. For the first time, Argo had turned to alcohol for solace. Drinking was an after-hours refuge from the emotional pain of having to see Jesamine for most of every day, but never being able to touch except as their duties dictated, and never to feel or taste her. His drinking had caused a certain consternation on the part of Raphael, with whom he shared quarters, but it had seemed better than living with a constant hurt, and mercifully the young and less-than-outgoing young Hispanian had not made mention of it to anyone else. Yancey Slide could hardly have been unaware of Argo’s newfound taste for the bottle, but he had also said nothing, and, now that they had started on the march south, Riordan, who watched him constantly, also knew his secret and attempted to ensure that Argo did not indulge to any greater extent than the other young officers who thronged the expedition’s mess tents every night.

Argo glanced at Riordan and, not for the first time, wondered what kind of reports the crippled Sergeant of Horse turned in on him, to whom, and what details they might contain. Argo knew that The Four were not only watched for their own protection, but because, on a number of levels, The Four weren’t totally trusted. Albany folk had deep misgivings about anything even remotely connected to the paranormal, and were uncomfortable with even talk of the Other Places. The new Americans who had settled along the eastern seaboard of the massive and barely explored continent were materialists in a material world, living in the immediate temporal reality. It was totally understandable. To the west of the settled Kingdoms, Commonwealths, and Republics was a vast interior of great rivers, deep forests, deserts, endless grasslands, and snow-capped mountains. The aboriginal confederacies, tribes, and nations were well-versed in the Other Places, ventured on other planes and in other dimensions, and had quickly recognized the paranormal dangers posed by the Mosul; the horror of the battlefield Dark Things, and all the other hideous conjurations of the Zhaithan that they used alongside their more conventional weapons. The comparative newcomers from across the Northern Ocean had, on the other hand, left their ancient knowledge and former beliefs back in the old world. The Mosul invasion had forced them to reluctantly reconsider the old ways, but they still had serious reservations about those among them who practiced the invisible arts, even if it was in the cause of Albany and the freedom of the Americas.

Argo turned his horse and faced his minder. He gestured to the fields and woods all round them. “I’m back in Virginia, Sergeant of Horse.”

“I’m well aware of that, Major Weaver, but aren’t we here to be setting its people free?”

“Until less than a year ago, I was one of those people. Our village was small, just a couple of hundred people, but we had our share of Zhaithan hangings, and men and women burned in the fire for no other reason than they helped the sick, and some collaborator denounced them to the Ministry of Virtue.”

The Mosul had come to the Americas soon after Argo’s eleventh birthday. The invasion force had landed near Savannah on July 5th ’96 by the old calendar and, on that hot summer’s day, the world he’d known as a child had vanished forever. The Mosul had immediately established multiple beachheads, and then fanned out to cut through the courageous but disorganized forces of the Southland Alliance in a matter of just days. Within a month, Atlanta had fallen and, with Florida cut off and the infamous treaty concluded with George Jebb and his gang of traitors in St. Petersburg, Hassan IX had turned his attention and armed might to the north, and the rich lands between the Appalachians and the Ocean.

Riordan grunted. “I know the people in Virginia had it hard.”

Two hundred years of carnage had come and gone since the Mosul, the descendants of merciless tribal nomads from an area to the east of the Black Sea, had advanced into Europe with fire and sword, and formed their unassailable alliance with the Teutons of Germany and the Mamaluke warlords in North Africa, to subjugate the Land of the Franks, the city states of Italia, and all of the Hispanic Peninsula. The immigrant peoples of the Americas should maybe have taken warning from the Mosul conquests in the old world, but the Northern Ocean was comfortingly wide, and they had believed that it would protect them in their hard-won isolation, and make them immune to the danger. They had grown too confident, however, in their geographic safety, even though many of the American settlers’ parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents might have crossed the seas as a direct result of the Mosul threat. When the enemy had landed, they had been no better equipped than the Franks, the Italians, or the Hispanians to resist the murderous onslaught of the most implacable war machine the world had ever had the misfortune to see, and they had been driven down to defeat by the Mosul’s iron discipline, fanatic religious motivation, and honed battle tactics.

Argo stared out across the Virginia landscape. “I knew one of the women who went to the fire. I knew her really well. She was a friend of my mother, and she’d helped nurse me when I was sick. I hid in a tall tree with some other boys and watched her burn.”

Riordan said nothing, and Argo knew he was losing control in front of the older man, but he was momentarily unable to check himself. “And the drunken bastard who denounced her could well have been my stepfather. His name was Herman Kretch, and he turned her in because she refused to fuck him.”