Provender Gleed (9 page)

There was a series of immense silver starbursts. Shrieking white dervishes whizzed off in all different directions.

Cynthia saw her husband. She saw her daughters. There was Uncle Fortune, sweaty and satanic. There was Great, craning his bony neck, peering up fiercely at the display.

All her Family. All her
family
.

Except Provender.

The likeliest explanation for his absence was that he had returned to the house; he was back in his suite, probably bashing away again on his damn videotyper.

Yet Provender loved fireworks. It was highly unusual that he wasn't here watching them.

On the ground, several dozen Roman candles ignited at once, and a host of golden sparks tumbled in a shimmering curtain.

Deep within her Cynthia felt the first faint pangs of misgiving.

She tried to ignore the feeling. She tried to convince herself she was being foolish.

She didn't quite succeed.

PART II

10

Between them, Damien bearing most of the weight, they carried Provender's inert form to the car and bundled him into the boot.

This, for Is, was the riskiest and most terrifying part of the plan. Security personnel were patrolling the grounds. There was no way of pretending there was anything innocent about two people lugging the sedated body of Provender Gleed to the catering-staff car park and depositing him in the back of one of the vehicles there. It was not possible, if caught red-handed, to claim this wasn't what it appeared to be. Up till then, everything could be explained away: she was just chatting with Provender, they were just getting on with each other, they were just going for a walk in the grounds to find a vantage point to watch the fireworks from. Now, from the moment Damien grabbed Provender and she administered the muscle relaxant, there was no longer the safeguard of a plausible cover story. What they looked like they were doing was exactly what they were doing: they were kidnapping him.

But they made it to Damien's car safely. They saw no one. No one saw them. No one challenged them. The fireworks afforded the ideal diversion. Everyone's attention, including the security personnel's, was on the display. Plus, it provided illumination to see by.

Is hated to admit it, but Damien had thought the whole thing through really pretty well. He had had help, she knew, but nonetheless...

Damien lowered the lid of the boot and clumped it shut, leaning on it with all his weight. The catch was temperamental, sometimes not working and sometimes working too well, so that you had to thump the lid to get it to open. That was the problem with Chinese import cars like the Dragon Wind Compact. Not only were they unreliable but replacement parts, so often needed, were hard to come by. And with Dragon Winds in general there was the additional flaw of a crude catalytic converter which gave the exhaust emissions an unusually sulphurous stench. This had prompted motoring journalists to crack many a predictable joke about the brand name.

Tonight the god of felony was in a benign mood and the catch on the Compact behaved itself. Damien raised his hands slowly, experimentally. The boot lid did not spring open. He allowed himself a quick, tight smile.

'Right. Let's roll.'

They drove out along one of the estate's back roads, the Dragon Wind's headlamps combing the dark. Is, in the passenger seat, sat with her fingernails digging into her palms. They weren't free and clear yet, far from it. There was the gate to get through. To be precise, there was the security presence at the gate to get past. She knew Damien had prepared for this contingency, but that didn't in any way help to calm her heart rate or unclamp the tightness in her belly. She was half-dizzy with fear and adrenaline.

Damien, by contrast, seemed to be thriving on the excitement. He was confident in the driving seat, his fingers tapping out a merry rhythm on the steering wheel. As Is looked at him, studying his profile, she remembered that he was handsome. It was an odd revelation. How could she have forgotten? But there it was. He had a near-spherical head which betokened, she thought, integrity, and eyes which, though a mite too deep-set, shone with a zealous gleam. His jaw, with its pronounced overbite, could have detracted from his looks but somehow didn't.
Piranha-esque
, a girlfriend of hers had once called it, but Is didn't think that was quite right. (Besides, the remark was made after Is and Damien broke up, when slagging off the ex was considered fair game, indeed was a vital part of post-relationship the healing process.) He was well-built, too. Even wearing that absurd Harlequin outfit, he had physical presence. Damien was not someone people took lightly or dared laugh at.

Up ahead, the gate hove into view. Is glimpsed the brick-built guardhouse by the road's edge, with its open arched doorway. The guardhouse had been occupied by a member of the security staff when she and Damien had arrived this afternoon, a thickset monster of a man with hod-carrier shoulders and a face that looked like it had received more than its fair share of punches. He had leaned out to inspect their passes like some troll from its cave. Now, as far as she could tell, the guardhouse was empty.

Damien drew to a halt in front of the gate. 'Better make this quick.' He eyed the dashboard clock's phosphorescent dial. 'We've got a half-hour window and it's closing.'

Is leapt out of the car and hurried over to the guardhouse. As she neared the doorway she slowed and peered cautiously in, just to be sure. Yes, empty. The security man was off chasing shadows in the grounds. If interrogated, he would claim he heard suspicious sounds out in the woods and went to investigate. She couldn't imagine how large a bribe it must have taken to convince a trained security professional to abandon his post on a bogus pretext and, in so doing, jeopardise his entire career. All Damien had said was that it was a lot of money. He had also said that they had to be through the gate before the security man returned. If they were still there when he came back from his wild-goose chase, he would have no alternative but to challenge them. The elasticity of the man's conscience stretched only so far.

Is ventured into the guardhouse and quickly located the gate-operating mechanism, a wall-mounted control panel with two buttons on it, one with arrows pointing together, the other with arrows pointing apart. She punched the latter, and with a deep, heavy clank the gate unlocked itself. Its leaves swung ponderously apart and Damien steered the Dragon Wind through.

As Is got ready to hit the button that closed the gate, she thought she heard the thump of footfalls. Her breath caught in her throat. She leaned out of the guardhouse and scanned the darkened woods, her eyes panic-wide, expecting to see the security man come lumbering out from among the trees, sidearm drawn.

Not religious, she nevertheless sent up a small prayer.
Please, God, no
.

Then she heard the thumps again and realised it was the firework display. Three miles distant, a series of rockets detonated and then crackled like splintering tinder.

Slamming the gate-closing button, Is sprinted out of the guardhouse, darted through the narrowing gap between the gate leaves, ran to the car and jumped in. 'Go.'

Damien, seeing how spooked she was, smirked. 'We were fine, you know. Five minutes to spare.'

'I don't care. Fucking drive!'

It wasn't until they were a mile down the road that Is was able to draw a steady breath again. She vowed never to put herself through anything like that again. Ever.

'That stuff you injected Provender with,' Damien said as he negotiated a junction that took them off the lane that ran alongside the perimeter of Dashlands and onto another lane. 'The comatose thingy...'

'Comaphase.'

'Thank you. How long's it supposed to last for, again?'

'It was fifteen migs. Should keep him down for three quarters of an hour.'

Damien checked the dashboard clock. 'Right, so in about twenty minutes, we find a lay-by, pull over and give him a second dose.'

'If we have to. But he'll probably stay groggy even after he's come round. His head'll be fuzzy and he won't know what's going on. It's best not to give him two shots in a row if we don't have to. He might not react well.'

'It's twenty miles to London. Half an hour at least.'

'Let's risk it, Damien. Honestly, even if he wakes up, he'll be in a stupor. He won't be shouting for help or trying to escape or anything.'

Damien remained unconvinced, but nodded. 'OK, if you say so. But we hear the slightest funny noise from back there, anything at all, we stop and jab him. Agreed?'

'Agreed.'

'So load up your hypodermic just in case.'

She did, steadying herself against the car's rocking as she drew off a further 15 milligrams of the sedative from the ampoule which she had raided from the hospital supply closet and smuggled out of the building in her pocket. She flicked the syringe to raise the air bubbles, then depressed the plunger till a bead of clear fluid welled at the needle's tip. The needle, she noticed, was still smeared with Provender's blood.

Family blood.

When you looked at it, it was just blood, no different from anybody else's, same colour, same consistency. But to a Family it was everything. In what it represented, it was immeasurably precious.

For the first time, Is had an inkling that what Damien had in mind for Provender, the rest of his plan, was feasible. She hadn't dared believe this before. It had seemed dangerous to hope for so much. But the blood on the needle offered a kind of symbolic assurance. It said the Gleeds needed Provender returned to them. They would give anything, pay anything, accede to any demand, in order to get him back alive.

11

Leafy Berkshire - kept nice and rural because that was how the Gleeds liked their home county - gave way to the outskirts of London. The scattering of houses on either side of the dual carriageway became clusters of houses, then knots of houses, revealed by their lighted windows. A greater glare of light denoted Heathrow Aerodrome, where passenger and cargo airships swung at their tethers, white-bellied, like slumbering whales. The road veered towards then away from a stretch of tram track, part of the network that webbed the entire country, an automated transport system for the exclusive use of Family members. Beneath spark-spitting wires a lone tram was barrelling along, its lamp-lit interior furnished with leather armchairs and teak fixtures. No one was aboard. It was estimated that, on average, less than half of one per cent of the trams on the network were occupied at any time. An absurdly wasteful and costly means of getting about; yet the Families loved it, cherished it, and begrudged not one penny of the expense of running and maintaining it.

The glow of London brass-burnished the sky ahead. Suddenly the stars were gone. The city, jealous, would not have them. Suburbs stretched and flexed like a rising tide. Buildings crested upward, the troughs of streetlamp radiance in-between deepening. London massed itself; began to tower. Spikes and spires and skyscrapers, equalling Manhattan's for size, bristled all around. Height was the measure of a capital's worth, and London reached for altitude as keenly as any of its main rivals. Soon, if the Risen London Authority's plans went ahead, there would be cable cars operating between street-level and the summits of the tallest edifices. They were doing that in New York. They were doing it in Paris and Warsaw as well. They would be doing it here.

The road, single carriageway now, wound between the bases of the skyscrapers or sometimes tunnelled straight through. It rollercoastered along a series of elevated sections. It fissured off into slip-roads, or fused with an adjacent road. Traffic, at this hour, was light, and consisted primarily or taxis and electric buses, with the occasional freight lorry bumbling along on a fart of diesel fumes.

Now Damien steered the Dragon Wind off at the appropriate exit and, after negotiating a warren of dingy streets, drove through an entranceway that was neither gate nor outlet but rather indicated transition, a passage from state of existence to another. On one side, the rest of the world. On the other...

The name arched above the entranceway in iron:

NEEDLEGROVE

Each character was sharp and heavy, like a guillotine blade about to drop. You seldom went under them, even in a vehicle, without a reflexive hunching of the shoulders. And once you were through, the side on which the rest of the world stood seemed just that bit cleaner, just that but brighter, than where you were now. The difference was hard to define but there was definitely a difference.

The tower blocks of Needle Grove, numbering fifty in all, were thick-bodied and many-tiered. They didn't climb straight but rose in staggered sections, narrowing, like irregular ziggurats. They were thinner at top than at bottom and yet, confusingly, through some architectural optical illusion, the higher up you went the less space there seemed to be between them. They didn't, in all, behave as normal residential buildings, or any sort of buildings, should. Their bulk intimidated rather than inspired.

Threading between the blocks at almost every level there were overpasses and underpasses. There were cantilevered communal areas - concrete plazas suspended in mid-air, where, if you were lucky, some greenery grew, a tree, a shrub, a clump of grass, failing that a weed. There were spiralling outdoor staircases that threw off exit arms like spokes on a spindle. All these, from dawn to dusk, cast shade. They eclipsed one another and cumulatively occluded the ground. At any hour of the day, whatever the weather, down on the ground it was perpetual overcast twilight.

Damien drove along roadways where, if you saw another car, it was either in motion or a burned-out husk. Teenagers roamed, shrinking from the headlamp beams as though the light scalded their faces. They were kitted out according to various gang-tribe dress codes. Young Moderns sported slicked-down hairdos and three-piece suits with what appeared to be fob-watch chains across the front of the waistcoats (but they were longer than ordinary fob-watch chains and those switchblades at the end were no timepieces). The Radical Flappers looked like square-heeled good-time girls out for an evening's Charlestoning, but cross them and you'd soon learn what damage a wire-strung feather boa could do. The Technologists resembled robots as closely as it was humanly possible to do, while the Changelings, acknowledging that styles and fashions were protean and altered almost daily, wore a gallimaufry of types of clothing, diversity their uniform.