Notes from a regicide, p.13
Wings of Fire, page 13
“I don’t know if you think it’s been worth the sacrifices, in the end,” she whispered to the sleeping selkie. “I don’t suppose I ever will. But I’m glad you’re here…”
She thought she saw Fiana’s mouth curve in a gentle smile in her sleep.
As she slipped out of the bedroom and stepped into the parlour she noticed Jack stretched out in the armchair by the fire, his eyes closed. She tiptoed past him, and out through the front door. The fact that she had found it ajar should have warned her that there would be someone outside, but she still started at the glow of a cigarette in the darkness. She paused, suddenly uncertain.
“Who’s there?”
“Me,” said Paul. “What are you doing here? I thought you were asleep.”
Sabrina laughed. “Sure,” she said. “And the proverbial pigs might fly.”
“I suppose that would be too much to ask at this point,” he conceded. “Smoke?”
They were suddenly awkward, like two teenagers caught out in an illicit rendezvous. Sabrina shook her head and then realised he probably couldn’t see the gesture in the darkness.
“I don’t smoke,” she said. “Thanks.”
“To tell you the truth, neither do I. Normally. I bought this packet for Mike. He always runs out.” Paul chuckled quietly. “Christ, but I needed a smoke just then.”
She felt as though she had invaded his privacy somehow, that she had blundered into a personal space where she had no right to be—and she had come out to be alone, anyway. But somehow she felt no urge to leave, and he seemed content to have her there.
“Are you all right?” Paul suddenly said into the silence. Sabrina turned to look at him in surprise.
“I...” Sabrina was going to offer a platitude, and then realised she couldn’t. Instead, she shook her head. “I keep on remembering things I never knew.”
“You think you know people,” Paul said, as if in agreement. “And then, all of a sudden, you know absolutely nothing about anything...”
“Exactly,” Sabrina said, although he was being thoroughly incoherent and probably talking about something quite different than herself. But it seemed to make sense. She had lost the only father she had ever known in the space of a few instants and gained a shadowy figure of mythical proportions in his stead.
Paul’s mind, however, was on other things.
“He is my friend,” Paul said. “I’ve known him for years.”
Jolted out of her own spiral by Paul’s far more immediate dilemma, Sabrina considered his words. “Do you think he is right, the Uncle?”
“I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.” Paul allowed himself a short, sharp laugh. “Any of it.”
“Paul—you don’t have to come...”
The clouds had cleared, and the night was awash in thin moonlight. In the faint glow Sabrina’s upturned face suddenly struck him with the strength of a revelation. He opened his mouth to say something and found himself bereft of words. Instead, he flung down the half-smoked cigarette and ground it out rather viciously under his shoe.
“Oh, yes,” he said grimly, “I do. If he is wrong, if Uncle Bob is playing some sort of trick, then I need to be there. I owe Mike that much.”
“And if he is not?”
“I don’t know. I won’t know until I see it. And for that I have to be there.”
“You have a choice,” she countered. “You still have a choice.” She fingered the pendant around her neck, and he noticed the gesture. Without quite knowing why he did it, he reached to take her hand, pulling it away from the symbol of Uncle Bob’s binding.
“Sabrina—he can’t make you...”
“And if he is right?” she whispered.
“If it’s the end of the world?” His voice was harsh. “I guess we have to try. At least we’ve got some help.”
“Help?” she echoed.
Paul felt his mouth twist into a smile. “I must admit,” he said, “that if anyone had told me that I would be marching into the bowels of the earth with a taniwha at my tail, I would have probably called them a few names best not mentioned in polite society.”
“Or a couple of seals.” Sabrina looked away into the night.
“Stop,” he said abruptly. “You are not one.”
Sabrina delicately freed her fingers from his. “I don’t know what I am anymore,” she said,
“You’re a human being, like me,” he said. “And if we don’t get some rest, all of those damn spirits and sprites are going to have to go on without us in the morning.” He held out his hand to her. “Come on.”
The door squeaked as Paul pushed it open, and when they walked back into the parlour they saw Jack sitting up in his chair. “I thought,” he said, “you were all supposed to be asleep.”
Paul shrugged. “I’m still not entirely sure I’m not. Sabrina, at least try to get some rest.”
Sabrina dropped her eyes, and turned away from him. “I just wish,” she said, “it was over.” She retreated into her bedroom, and the door closed quietly behind her.
She thought she would never go to sleep, but found herself groggily swimming back to consciousness while being shaken awake by Fiana’s gentle hand.
“Sabrina... I hate to wake you...”
“Is it time?”
“Jack says dawn is an hour away, maybe less. If we’re to leave soon, we’d better eat something. And that Uncle Bob… he’s making tea again.”
Sabrina groaned. “Is there any coffee in this house?”
*7*
“What happened to the substation… the real substation… when this house of yours took over?” Paul asked Uncle Bob as the small company was huddled over mugs of coffee in the parlour in the pre-dawn darkness.
“Why do you ask?” said Uncle Bob. He alone was drinking a cup of his ubiquitous tea, refusing to accept coffee as a civilised substitute.
“No reason I should, is there?” Paul shrugged. “Except for the inescapable fact that I find a cozy little cottage in its place, of course. Perfectly natural, that.” Paul knew he was being uncharacteristically rude, but, by God, he had reason to be. “There is also the salient point that this place was an above-ground double redundancy control centre. There is or was a lift, an access way into the tunnel leading into the turbine hall below. It is an easier way to get in.”
“If it was an easy way,” said Uncle Bob, “you may be sure that it will have been sabotaged by now.”
“Do you like making things difficult?”
“Do you know a way in or don’t you?” growled Uncle Bob, his polite veneer slipping in the face of his impatience to be gone.
“I know a way in,” said Paul, his antipathy sparking in his eyes. He had the good sense to look down as he spoke. No need to let Uncle Bob know just exactly what he thought of him, if he didn’t know already.
They set out into the night within the hour.
The light of Uncle Bob’s friendly house soon faded away. Paul took the lead, followed by Sabrina, Uncle Bob, and Fiana, leaving Jack to bring up the rear.
They emerged onto a gravelled road which ran from the jetty on the lake up to the vertical face of the mountain, and was swallowed by it. Huge gates, wide and tall enough to admit buses into the main access tunnel, barred their way forward, black and brooding in the night.
“It’s like going into Mordor,” Sabrina muttered.
“More like the mines of Moria,” said Paul, who had lifted the cover off a numeric keypad and was peering at it under the faint lantern light.
“Speak, friend, and enter,” quoted Sabrina instantly.
Paul lifted his head; she could see his teeth flash white in the shadows of his face. She would probably have known about the Bradbury story, too, he thought, feeling inordinately pleased about that. She was like him after all, it seemed. In the important ways. At the very least she had read the right books.
Sabrina grinned back in return.
“Hurry!” said Uncle Bob urgently.
The moment of contact was gone. “It’s done, it’s done,” said Paul, dropping the keypad cover back into place. “Come on.”
It was Uncle Bob, both impatient and almost too eager, who pushed the gates open and entered first. The tunnel was lit by a series of faint emergency lights, casting scattered and pathetically inadequate pools of yellow light which left most of the place in shadow. Fiana drew her breath in sharply as she walked in.
“Hang on,” said Paul. “There’s a torch here somewhere. And then I’ll go find the main light switch.”
He rooted around in a cabinet immediately to the right of the door, swore, poked around some more, and eventually came up with a small pocket torch no longer than the palm of his hand. “Damn, damn, damn,” he said. “There should be one of those big industrial torch-lamps here. There always is.”
“My brother is expecting me,” said Uncle Bob dryly.
Paul lifted a sardonic eyebrow at the royal arrogance of his statement, and then turned back to the business at hand. “This will do. Wait. I’ll just get the lights up.”
“What makes you think they’ll work?” said Uncle Bob very softly. “The man knows we’re coming—and darkness is his nature.”
“He can’t have screwed up the whole electrical system,” snapped Paul. “I know, I put it together.”
But he was underestimating his opponent. Whatever had been done to the lighting system had been pretty thorough. Paul had gone to two different hatches at separate points in the twisting tunnel, played the pocket torch around within, picked up wiring, tried toggling switches, swore a lot under his breath—but it was to no avail, the main lights stayed off, and only the little pools of amber-yellow light under the emergency bulbs remained to illuminate the bare rock walls.
“Never mind those now,” Uncle Bob said at length, losing patience. “Which way?”
“Down,” Paul said. “It all leads down.”
Uncle Bob lifted the lantern with which he had lighted their way from his house. Paul had left it with him when he had gone torch-hunting. Now it mingled its flickering light into the yellow glow in the tunnel. “Come on then. He’s close. I can almost hear him breathing.”
He plunged into the tunnel, without turning to look back at his companions.
Paul slammed the latest hatch he had opened with what seemed like unnecessary force. “Keep together,” he said.
“Why?” Jack asked. “You just said all the roads lead to the same place.”
“Eventually,” said Paul cryptically. “Sabrina?”
“I’m here.”
Uncle Bob was almost out of sight. The tunnel seemed to eat light; his lantern was only a flickering ghost of itself. Paul’s pocket torch and the dim emergency lights were a poor substitute.
“Wait for us!” called Fiana, losing her nerve, feeling the darkness gather at her back. She hastened after Uncle Bob; Jack followed, and so did Paul after a last baleful glance at the offending hatch. Sabrina started after them.
“Briny.”
The voice, the name, lost and achingly familiar, unlooked for in the dark...
Sabrina’s breath caught in her throat. Her knees were suddenly so much jelly, and she staggered against the rock, an unseen wall under a blown emergency light that left a whole portion of the tunnel in deep shadow—and felt not stone, but wood under her hand. Wood that gave at her push. A door. A door left ajar.
“Briny,” the soft voice said again. “Come.”
“You are not here,” she whispered, her voice thick with pain. “You are not here.”
“I’m here.”
There was a glimmer of something on the other side of the door—match light, a lighter, something small and evanescent. In its fleeting gleam, just before it went out again, she saw him standing there, the same old smile in his dark eyes, the smile that had made her head swim the first time she had seen him.
“Marco...”
He held out his hand in the lightless tunnel and she reached out for it—and oh, he was solid, he was real, his hand was the hand she knew so well. At its gentle pull, she followed, blinded by love and darkness and tears.
It had all lasted a fraction of a minute, no longer than it had taken for the rest of them to take a few steps. But that was time enough. Jack and Paul, the man Jack had recognised and whom he had called Hunter, had both whirled at the same instant, spurred by the same sense of danger, only to see an empty tunnel stretching behind them and a shape that may or may not have been Sabrina vanishing into shadows as though she had walked through a wall. Jack broke into a run, back the way he had just come, with Paul close at his heels.
Jack reached the door first. It was now firmly shut, unyielding to his hand. He tore at the metal knob that served as handle, trying to wrench it open, but it did not move. Paul, barely a step behind him, was more practical—he shone his light at a keypad on the wall next to the door while he punched a code into it. The keypad bleeped back at him with a red light.
Jack let go of the door knob and watched as Paul cursed and tried again. He got the same response. “Can you open it?”
“What does it look like?” Paul snapped, trying a different code. No difference. “Damn it, he’s changed the codes! I should have access to everything here.”
Fiana, out of breath as though she had been running a far greater distance than the short stretch of tunnel which she’d had to traverse, appeared behind them. “What’s going on?”
“The security system works on different levels. Each door has a minimum security level. I have access to everything, but the codes have been changed.” Paul paused. “I didn’t think Mike knew how to do that,” he said reflectively.
Jack looked around him. “Is there another way? Where does this door lead to?”
Paul shrugged. “Down to the turbine hall, eventually, like everything else. It’s a service shaft, that’s all.”
“So if we carry on down this tunnel, we’ll get there?”
“Yeah. It’s slower, but we’ll get there. If that’s where he’s going.”
“Step aside.”
Uncle Bob had finally joined them. Now he handed the lantern to Fiana before he threw his full bulk against the door, trying to break it down. It didn’t even shudder at his considerable weight.
Paul had to smile at the futility. “It won’t work. That door may look like wood, but it’s reinforced with steel. It won’t move.”
Bob turned on him with venom. “That’s convenient, isn’t it? Now, where is he going?”
Paul stared at him for a moment, stunned by the sudden change in the old man—from gentle persuasion to naked hostility in a heartbeat….What was he talking about? “I don’t even know if it is Mike, how can I know what he’s doing?”
Uncle Bob stepped closer, and although he and Paul were more or less of a height he somehow managed to tower over him. Jack exchanged a baffled look with Fiana, uncertain of what was going on.
“You know what he’s doing. You’re his friend. I suspected this from the start, but I wasn’t sure... This is proof enough for me, proof that you’re really one of his, that you’re helping him… how else did he manage to steal Sabrina?”
Paul could hardly recognize the refined, gentle man he had met earlier. It was all gone. Now he faced pure fury, cold and elemental. “I had nothing to do with that, and you know it!” he snapped. “If it is really Mike we’re following, then he’s kept me in the dark as long as I’ve known him. Besides, if I were helping him, would I have let you in here?”
Jack put a hand on Uncle Bob’s shoulder. “He’s right.”
Uncle Bob shook him off, but stepped away from Paul. He looked at Jack with distaste. “You don’t know what you’re up against, taniwha. You think it’s about your precious little lake, and little Sabrina. But it’s much bigger and much more important than that.”
“Sabrina? How is this about Sabrina now? You said…” Fiana stood beside Jack, looking small and fragile and yet, somehow, suddenly dangerous. She was only here because of Sabrina; the promise she had made to her father, and the half-sister whom she had grown to love, were her only stakes in this adventure. And now Sabrina was gone; and Uncle Bob was dismissing this as something of no consequence whatsoever.
Everyone there had their own agenda, of course, and Paul’s was Mike, the friend-who-was-not-a-friend, the fiend who would shatter the world—if Uncle Bob was to be believed. “If it was Mike, why would he take Sabrina?” Paul demanded.
Uncle Bob almost spat the reply. “Because she was my weapon, and now he’s got her!”
“Your weapon?” Paul felt the anger well up inside him. He had known there was more to this than Uncle Bob had told them. “How could she be a weapon?”
“Because he would have done whatever I wanted if I’d walked in there with her in my hand! They were lovers!”
“Lovers?”
Paul was uncomfortably aware that he was standing there with his mouth open. Uncle Bob had done it again—just as Paul would somehow manage to get the pieces to fit, to get a glimpse of what looked like a halfway coherent picture, however bizarre, something would happen to shiver it all to splinters once again.
Sabrina—fragile, gentle Sabrina—had been the lover of this prince of darkness they were following, Bob’s brother?
Or had she known the man he had become friends with? Moody, sensitive Mike?
This just made no sense. How could Mike, his friend, Sabrina’s lover, be such an evil creature? How could he have been so wrong?
He looked up and met Gregor Mihailovitch Borodin’s eyes, and saw the ancient hatred in them. He forced himself to look closer, search the old face for clues. The hunter’s instinct for knowing his environment stirred at the back of his mind, and something suddenly crystallised for him. It was wrong, it was all wrong…
His voice was very calm and quiet when he spoke. “If he is evil, then why were you stopped? Why was he protected… why did the angels protect him when you were children?”
Jack started at the change in Paul. A moment ago he had been livid, shouting, and now he was calm and deliberate.
Hunter.
