Conflagration (6 page)

But now the interlude was ending. The gift was spent. In the tiny tent that Oonanchek had raised for the ritual of severance, the cut cord that was the symbol of their too-brief intimacy lay on the blanket in front of Jesamine, like something that had once lived but was now dead.

“You are free, Jesamine; free to return to your companions, to The Four, to your true
takla
.”

Magachee held Jesamine from behind, cradling and comforting her, stroking her hair, like a mother about to send a child out into the world. Oonanchek brought Jesamine’s uniform. Still dizzy from the smoke, she shook her head, then rose, still free and naked. Magachee leaned forward and kissed her thigh one last time. She took the uniform from Oonanchek. A small leather medicine bag lay on top of the carefully folded garments. She looked questioningly at him and he smiled. “A final gift. A part of us to take with you. And the summons for the
Quodoshka.
”

Jesamine frowned. “I have nothing to give to you in return.”

“You have given and continue to give.”

“But…”

“We need speak no more of it.”

Jesamine nodded and slowly started to dress. Putting on the uniform felt too much like strapping on armor for a coming and terrible fight.

RAPHAEL

A lumbering fighting machine clanked and rumbled past, and his horse snorted and attempted to shy. Raphael Vega brought the animal under control, but with some difficulty. He had only been riding since he had arrived in Albany, and his horsemanship was still little more than rudimentary. The steam-driven mechanical monster was one of the older models, slower and less efficient than the sleeker and more compact petroleum-driven machines that had been supplied to Albany by the Norse Union. Smoke billowed from its stack, oil leaked like black blood from between its welded and riveted plates, and somewhere inside its cramped, iron-gray interior, a sweating crew included a stoker shoveling coal into a boiler. That even the antiquated should be committed to the field indicated the desperate seriousness with which the coming fight was being treated. A few days earlier, he had heard talk among some of the staff officers. Field Marshal Virgil Dunbar, the Albany supreme commander, was personally leading the push to the south, and his long-term plan was to drive the Mosul all the way back to their original beachhead. Savannah was still the hub and nerve center of the Mosul American conquest, and it was there where they would first be surrounded, then contained. Finally, ringed with hastily constructed launch sites for Norse rocket bombs, they would be blown back into the Northern Ocean. The younger officers were completely optimistic. They had held the Mosul at the Potomac, and saw the coming task one of herding them like sheep for the entire length of the Eastern Seaboard. As far as they were concerned it presented no particular problem.

The callow captains and junior lieutenants had not noticed Raphael listening or they might not have spoken so freely. Raphael knew they did not trust him. Not only was he one of The Four, and an over-publicized practitioner in the highly suspect paranormal arts, but he had also formerly been a lowly conscript in the Mosul infantry. Just to make matters worse in the eyes of these Albany aristocrats, he was a foreigner. Thus he failed on all levels; by criteria of class, occupation, history, and nationality, he was unacceptable, and yet they had to accept him, because they needed his powers, and also because, when he had been inducted into their army, he had been given the rank of major as a matter of convenience, and so, in the chain of command, he was technically their superior. Raphael also did not share the young staff officers’ view of the war. He knew too much about Mosul discipline and Mosul tenacity to believe the armies of Hassan IX could simply be herded back to Savannah like so many stray sheep. He kept his own council, however, and said nothing. Since he had come to Albany, Raphael had learned the knack of keeping himself to himself.

The fighting machine was now lumbering on, laying a pall of smoke and vented steam and leaving deeply gouged tracks in its wake. Two more of the massive contraptions followed, also bothering his horse, and forcing Raphael to keep the mare on a very tight rein. A troop of lancers passed behind him at a brisk trot, their reined-in mounts tossing their heads and snorting. The army of Albany was dividing into its components, making ready for battle in a state of controlled military chaos that made no sense to those actually in the middle of it, but, Raphael devoutly hoped, was perfectly clear to the commanders with the overall view. A column of infantry formed ranks, and then marched out with slung rifles and the peaks of their caps down over their eyes. As this column of fours hit their stride, one of the chosen men struck up a song, and the whole company joined in with the lusty and reckless confidence of swaddies who had drunk their gin ration fast and early and are deliberately not thinking about what the future might have up its sleeve.

Oh, farewell Mary, I must march

On and on and on and on

I’ll miss your tits and I’ll miss your arse

On and on and on and on

From Brooklyn Town to Carver’s Bay

Over the hills and far away.

The infantry company moved out, and their song merged into the general cacophony of mobilization; the shouts of sergeants, the noise of horses, the grind and cough of machinery. He glanced around, and then pulled out his pocket watch. Where were the others? They should have been at the assembly point by this time. He experienced a second of unease. He was in the right place, wasn’t he? He checked and quickly reassured himself that this was the part of the camp specified in the orders that they had all received the previous night. It was not unusual for Raphael to be the first to arrive at any designated meeting. Since he remained so much on his own, feeling more secure in the company of his sketch pad than other people, he usually had less to delay him than Cordelia, Argo, or Jesamine. Argo might well be still curing a hangover. Jesamine had become quite unpredictable since she’d taken up with the Ohio, and Cordelia made no secret that she considered punctuality a petty bourgeois preoccupation, well below the considerations of a lady. Even during the rigors of training, she was habitually late, and when she did arrive, she could usually be counted on to complain.

Of course, during training, they had all complained, but only Raphael had been unable to air his supposed grievances with total conviction. He had been through the horrors of a Mosul boot camp, and nothing in the long winter training could compare with that nightmare. Except, maybe in one respect. The training of The Four had been a whole lot harder on the intellect. The Mosul’s goal was to turn their Provincial Levies into mindless automatons, who would simply obey like brutes, without thought or question. It was made clear that the packed rank and file of the Mosul infantry were valued less than the horses of the Mamalukes. They were worth nothing and they need expect nothing, except to be a lowly component in one of the infamous “human waves” that were hurled against the enemy and expected to prevail by sheer weight of numbers, regardless of the death toll. Hadn’t Gunnery Instructor Y’assir always reminded Raphael’s squad when he threatened them with execution for one of the dozen or more infractions that carried the death penalty,
“You’ll be hung, maggot, because you aren’t worth the three fegs it costs for a bullet and the powder to shoot you.”

The Four, on the other hand, had been expected to think. They were required to use their ingenuity, to attempt new things, to record their successes in detail so they could be repeated, and to analyze their failures so other ways could be devised to reach the same goal. Since such a regime of training had never been previously attempted in known history, both trainees and trainers were essentially making it all up as they went along, and that was why such emphasis was put on originality and creative thinking. They had been under the tutelage and care of the African woman T’saya, and the inhumanly strange Yancey Slide, although other specialists had been brought in with the hope that they might be able to make a contribution. Some of what the quartet went through, although grueling, was straightforward and physical. They had run and climbed and swum and exercised, just like any other teenage recruit, all according to an only slightly adapted version of the Albany Rangers training manual. At the other extreme, they had meditated and honed their cognitive skills. They had also drunk, swallowed, and smoked strange potions and mixtures devised by T’saya, the Shaman Gray Wolf, and the Lady Gretchen. They had experienced visions and tripped to other realities, unclear as to whether the landscapes in which they found themselves were real or merely the products of their assembled imaginations.

The metaphor of flying had been used since their very first excursions into the Other Place. They “flew” over occult landscapes of both incredible beauty and measureless horror. Their paranormal workouts had become known as “training flights.” Then the metaphor had been taken too far, and a trainer had been brought in from the Norse-run flying school of the Royal Albany Air Corps, to see if he could devise a way to record the “geography” of the Other Place, but, in a matter of hours, the veteran aviator had become so violently spooked that he made his stammering excuses and left. In the Other Place, they had essentially worked on refining the pattern they had instinctively fallen into when, during the battle of the Potomac, still knowing nothing, and hardly knowing each other, they had been expected to stem the paranormal assault by Quadaron-Ahrach, the High Zhaithan, and his twin sister, Her Grand Eminence Jeakqual-Ahrach. They had found through trial and error that the original approach, and playing to their basic strengths, was always the best way: Cordelia tended to surge ahead, while Argo followed like a protective, ever watchful shadow, on the lookout for unexpected danger. Jesamine would take a center position and her inclination was to function as an anchor. Raphael brought up the rear, and was constantly sensitive to what might suddenly appear behind them. An implacable caution seemed to be emerging as his strongest attribute. Plus, a remorseless and deadly resentment of any enemy that tried to blindside the
takla
.

As though acknowledging his thoughts of flying, three heavy RAAC Odin biplanes buzzed overhead, filling the clear morning air with the whine of their engines. The aircraft were either on a nuisance raid on the Mosul, flying out to drop their payloads of twenty-pound bombs on an enemy who was now halted and digging in, or else they’d been ordered up simply to enhance morale and military spectacle as Albany went to the shooting war. Their undersides were painted gray-blue so as to present a less precise target to possible ground fire, but Raphael knew the upper surfaces were bright and aggressive, and the Crowned Bear of Albany was emblazoned on top wings and tailplanes as though on the banners of ancient knights. The airplanes of the RAAC had no need of camouflage from the air. The Mosul so far possessed no aircraft, although everyone knew, sooner or later, their Teuton scientists, even hampered as they were by Zhaithan religious constrictions, would back-engineer one or more Norse flying machines. Eventually the Mosul would have a warplane of their own. But, until then, the RAAC could soar and swagger like Masters of the Air.

Raphael knew how the Odin pilots must value their ability to rise above the terrestrial slaughter. The illusion of flying at high speed that figured prominently in The Four’s first forays into the Other Place was a close approximation. They dived and they skyrocketed, and the enemy had come at them out of the bizarre cloud cover of impossible skyscapes. Further practice and a deeper exploration of their powers had presented other options, but flight was still their most powerful extra-reality. They still tended to enter the other place in the flying mode, if for no other reason than the knowledge that no safe training grounds existed in the Other Place, and even while they refined their concentration and rehearsed their moves, they were constantly at risk of attack by enemy entities every time they attempted the real thing. This was no empty fear. The enemy had come upon them no less than seven times during training. The now familiar, but no less dangerous, Mothmen had materialized out of nowhere and assailed them, lethally screaming. The new and hard to describe things with the streamlined bodies and razor-sharp cutting dorsals, that Cordelia had flippantly dubbed the “sports model,” had also appeared from sudden rents in the fabric, and The Four had been hard-pressed to fight them off and retreat to terrestrial safety.

Raphael might have fallen into full reverie, reliving those desperate moments of occult violence in his mind’s eye, had he not noticed Yancey Slide, mounted on a tall and rawboned black stallion, wending his leisurely way through the shout and bustle of the mobilizing camp. The tall, angular figure had watched over them all through training, and his long trademark duster coat and the wide-brimmed black hat tilted forward to conceal his face instilled Raphael with a certain confidence that at least one being understood the infinite strangeness they faced. Slide’s unique oriental sword was across his back in its decorative sheath, with the hilt at his left shoulder, and Raphael did not doubt Slide’s brace of equally outlandish pistols was concealed under the lavish drape of his coat. The inevitable cigar was stuck in the side of his mouth, and his hands were hidden in black gloves. Raphael had long since given up speculating as to what Slide might be, or from where he might have originated. The only thing Raphael knew for sure was that neither he nor any of The Four, even after all the things they had seen in the Other Place and elsewhere, ever wanted to look directly into Yancey Slide’s eyes.

A photographer from one of the Albany newspapers was taking pictures of the mobilization with a heavy, tripod-mounted, wood and brass-plate camera. The man saw Slide and made the mistake of pointing his lens at him. Slide turned slightly, as though starting to pose, but then extended the index and second finger of his right gloved hand and created a sudden tiny but brilliant spark. The photographer tottered back, cursing, and all but knocking over his camera. While the man was still stumbling, Slide rode on as though nothing had happened. The photographer recovered himself, and then pulled the now-ruined photosensitive plate out of the device. He stared after Slide in anger and frustration, then dashed the plate to the ground and stamped it into the earth. The delivered message had plainly been received. Yancey Slide was not to be photographed.