Conquest

  Syl swayed, her legs cramped and weak. Without Paul’s help, she would have fallen to the ground again. She took in the scene, her mouth agape: the shell of the shuttle was still on fire, but the rain had dampened the flames somewhat, and a small group of men and women were trying to smother those that still burned. Pieces of wreckage had been blown in a wide circle, and scattered among them were body parts, some identifiable, some not. It was a miracle that she had survived. Any one of those fragments of metal could have pierced her body or taken her head off instead of merely pinning her, however painfully, to the ground.

  “How did you get here?” she asked. “How did you find me?”

  “We knew you were coming,” said Paul. “A little bird told us.”

  “The crash?”

  “Arranged, insofar as you can arrange for a survivable crash.”

  “Right,” said Syl. “Forgive me if I’m wrong, but is this a rescue?”

  Somehow she managed a smile.

  “Not a very well-planned one,” he replied, “but better than some.”

  One of the men at the shuttle jumped back and shouted in pain, then rolled on the grass to put out the flames that were consuming his trouser leg.

  “What are they doing?” asked Syl.

  “Those flames can be seen from miles away,” said Paul. “We don’t want to draw them to us.”

  “Them?”

  “Your people,” said Paul.

  “They won’t just be looking for me,” said Syl.

  “Oh aye,” said Duncan. “You mean your Corps friend? He’s made a run for the hills, but we’ll find him.”

  So Gradus had survived as well. Syl felt a certain disappointment.

  “He’s no friend of mine,” she said.

  “Well, you’re no friend of mine either,” said Duncan. “If I had my way, we’d have left you to suffocate in the mud.”

  He turned his back on Syl, spat in the dirt to let her know just what he thought of her—as if that wasn’t already clear—and went to join the rest of the group.

  Paul opened a rucksack, and removed a rolled-up garment from inside. It looked like a loose wetsuit. Syl could see that the humans were all wearing similar garments, although most had accessorized them with jackets and sweaters, waterproof trousers, and bits of tartan.

  “Put this on,” said Paul. “You can go behind that rock to change.”

  “What is it?”

  “A darksuit.”

  Syl had heard of darksuits, but had never worn one. It was Illyri Military technology, used to hide body-heat signatures. The microscopic panels on the suits reproduced patterns of heat and cold based on the surrounding terrain, allowing the wearer to blend in with the landscape. Wearing darksuits and traveling at night, even a group like this one would be virtually invisible to searchers from above.

  She walked unsteadily to the big rock. Paul called after her, “Hey, you’re not going to try to run away, are you?”

  “Do I look like I could run away?” Syl replied. “Anyway, where would I go?”

  She stripped out of her wet prisoner’s overalls, and put on the darksuit. It was warm, and waterproof, and covered her from her toes to her neck. She threw away the flimsy shoes that she had been given back in the Vaults. They were ruined anyway. She zipped the darksuit up to her neck, and instantly it began to constrict over her body, fitting itself to her shape. It was a strange feeling, as though she were being enveloped by snakes. She was still shivering, but not as much. Her feet were freezing, though, and seemed likely to remain that way.

  She emerged from behind the rock. The flames were entirely extinguished now, and she could barely make out the shapes of the hills around her against the evening sky. The sun was gone, and there was no moon to be seen. The Highlanders had scavenged what they could from the wreckage, including documents and a uniform, and were now preparing to leave.

  “Very fetching,” said Paul.

  “I feel like a haggis,” said Syl.

  “These will help.”

  He handed her an old sweater, waterproof trousers, and a waterproof jacket. They smelled moldy, but they would keep her dry. A pair of boots was also found for her. They came from one of the bodies in the wreckage, but she tried not to think about that, and although they were a little big for her, at least they protected her feet.

  A shaven-headed man approached them.

  “This is Just Joe,” said Paul. “He’s in charge here.”

  Just Joe looked Syl over once, but did not acknowledge her.

  “We found the other one,” he said.

  •••

  Gradus had been discovered hiding in some bushes. He was cold and wet, but otherwise unharmed. The two Highlanders who had found him escorted him back to the main group. They were both women, and both a foot shorter than Gradus, but any thoughts the Grand Consul might have had of tackling them would have been pushed from his mind by their guns and the expressions of open hostility on their faces. Paul and Syl arrived just steps behind Just Joe as Gradus sank, exhausted, to his knees. His left arm was bleeding where the tracker had been cut from him and, Syl presumed, destroyed.

  “Who do we have here, then?” said Duncan, taking in Gradus’s soaked white and red garments. “It’s Santa Claus, and it looks like he has a ring for everyone.”

  “Jesus,” said Paul, as he arrived and saw the prisoner for the first time.

  “Jesus? Hah,” said Duncan. “I believe Jesus was a bit more concerned about goodwill to mankind and all that.”

  Gradus stared up at his captors but said nothing. His eyes flicked to Syl, and Syl thought there was an unspoken plea on his face.

  Don’t tell them who I am. Please, don’t tell them.

  Paul touched Just Joe on the arm. “I need to talk to you. In private.”

  They stepped away from the group, and a whispered conversation ensued. Syl couldn’t hear what was being said, but she saw Just Joe’s back straighten in surprise, and when he looked over his shoulder at Gradus, it was with a mixture of hatred and calculation. He saw Syl watching him, and gestured for her to come over.

  “The boy says this one is important,” said Just Joe. “Is that true?”

  And even though Syl had only hatred for Gradus—the Diplomat who had tried to part her from all those whom she loved, the one who advocated the killing of children—she still paused before answering. Syl was an Illyri, and what she said next might send another Illyri, however dreadful, to his death. But what was the point in lying? Paul had been in the Great Hall as his fate and that of his brother had been debated; both he and Steven had been physically injured by the Consul. If Gradus was to die, then his own actions would be responsible for it, not Syl’s, though she still hoped it would not come to that.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How important?”

  “He is the Grand Consul. Some say that he may even be as powerful as the president.”

  “And would they be right?”

  “No,” said Syl. “I think he may actually be more powerful than the president—although,” she added, “he’s still not as powerful as his wife.”

  “You could say the same thing about most of the men I know,” said Just Joe. “Still, the Illyri will be anxious to get him back?”

  “Very.”

  Just Joe let out a deep breath. “This complicates matters. The Illyri will tear the Highlands apart to find him. The easiest thing to do would be to kill him.”

  Syl found herself shaking her head. “Don’t.”

  “He would have hanged Paul and his brother, and many others like them,” said Just Joe. “He represents everything we’re fighting against.”

  “I know that.”

  Just Joe’s fingers danced on the butt of the semiautomatic pistol at his belt.

  “I said the easiest thing would be to kill him
,” he said at last. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I can. We need him alive.”

  He raised a finger in warning at Paul and Syl.

  “You say nothing about this to anyone else, you understand? As far as the rest are concerned, he’s just a Diplomat who has to be interrogated before any other decision is made. If I tell them he might be useful in a prisoner exchange, they’ll let him be.”

  He pushed between Syl and Paul, then spun on his heel and gripped Syl hard by the arm.

  “And they don’t know how important you are either, girlie, but I do,” he said. “You keep your head down and your mouth shut. We’re risking our lives for you, just as you risked yours for these boys, but if you cross me, I’ll leave you to die out here. Clear?”

  “Yes,” said Syl.

  “Good,” said Just Joe. He raised his hand above his head, and whistled loudly.

  “Let’s go. We’re moving out!”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  T

  he Archmage Syrene sat in stillness and solitude, a half-empty glass of cremos on the table before her. Her pupils were closed, and her lips moved silently. To a casual observer, she might almost have appeared to be praying. She was, in a way, but not to anything that a human being might have considered a god. But like Sedulus, Syrene believed that a god was merely another species, so advanced as to be almost beyond comprehension.

  The rain fell, and the wind blew, and Syrene’s mouth made its secret pacts.

  It might have surprised many Illyri to learn that Syrene loved her husband. From the moment she had emerged from the Marque and begun her courtship of him, it had been assumed that this was simply one further step in the Sisterhood’s careful accumulation of power, but Syrene had been watching Gradus for a long time, and had grown to admire him. Gradus was ambitious, and clever, and handsome in a crude way, yet one that appealed to Syrene. Together they had engineered his rise to within a step of the presidency, and there he had halted. In the beginning, he had not understood why he was to be denied the ultimate prize, the one to which he had aspired for so long, but Syrene had made him understand that they needed a pawn on the throne, a token that was expendable should the need arise, while the true power would be wielded behind the scenes. He had been angry and frustrated, but she had calmed him, and the result was that Syrene and Gradus were closer now than they had ever been. He needed her, but she needed him too. The Sisterhood had warned her of the unpredictability of love, of how she might be changed by it outside the Marque. She had been youthful, dismissive—as the young often are of the wisdom of the old—but the sisters had been right. Her love for Gradus had made her vulnerable.

  He was alive. She knew it. She felt it.

  Her silent words were now spoken aloud.

  “Bring him back safely to me,” she whispered. “He is mine, and I am his.”

  And that casual observer, had there been one to witness her plea, might have wondered to whom the Red Witch was speaking when she was so clearly alone in the room.

  But Syrene was not alone.

  She was never alone.

  •••

  Meia stood in the darkness of what had once been Knutter’s shop. It had taken her longer than usual to escape from the castle, for it now crawled with Securitats, reinforced by more of the Corps’s own troops. It was growing harder and harder for her to come and go unseen, particularly now that Vena was doing her best to keep her under surveillance. The time when Vena would have to be dealt with was drawing ever closer. An accident, perhaps; Meia could not risk outright murder. It would bring Vena’s lover, Sedulus, down on them all, and Sedulus made Vena look like a child when it came to his capacity for doing harm. The job could be farmed out to the Resistance, but the repercussions would be terrible. Sedulus would decorate the city with bodies hanging from lampposts. In Norway, the inhabitants of an entire town, Fagernes, had vanished overnight as punishment for a failed attempt on Sedulus’s life by the Norwegian Resistance. Meals had been left untouched on tables, and sentences remained unfinished in homework journals. A town of eighteen hundred people, suddenly silent and empty. Their fate was a mystery, but Meia had her suspicions. She had heard whispers about Sedulus’s “pets.”

  Would the Resistance in Scotland risk the same thing happening to somewhere like Moffat, or Langholm, or Brora? In time, thought Meia, they might have little choice; the escape of Paul and Steven Kerr had merely delayed the inevitable. If the Diplomats had their way, children would become legitimate targets, and the Resistance would respond in kind. The conflict between humans and the Illyri would descend to a new level of bloodshed.

  But there were more pressing issues to consider. Althea had returned with news from Trask of what the boys had seen in the tunnels beneath Knutter’s shop: human bodies being transported secretly under the city. Trask had been right: the stories of corpses disappearing from morgues and the crematorium, of the quiet removal of the sick from certain hospitals and care homes, had not simply been tales spread by the bored and the ignorant.

  Meia made her way to the basement. She removed her cloak, revealing the Securitat uniform that she wore beneath it, and silently became one with the darkness.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  T

  he Highlanders led Syl and Gradus northwest from the crash site and down into a valley where a muddy river churned, swollen by the rains. Although Syl had technically been the object of the rescue, she felt herself to be a prisoner almost as much as Gradus was. Nobody here entirely trusted her, perhaps not even Paul. Still, unlike Gradus, her hands were not tied. Paul walked just behind her, to her right. The river was on her left. She wondered if that was deliberate, if he was still concerned that she might try to run away and had decided that it would be better if the river cut off one potential avenue of escape while he took care of the other.

  She sneaked glances at him whenever she could, while trying to not be too obvious. His face was still puffy and damaged, but in profile she noticed that his eyebrow was cut by a thin white scar, fringed by the tiny dots left by stitches. She wanted to ask him how it had happened, but she didn’t want to make him feel bad about it. She was just curious. She wanted to know more about him.

  She wanted to ask him why he had kissed her.

  Her legs were still weak beneath her, but she was determined not to let anyone know. The terrain was rough, and would have shredded her flesh were it not for the boots, taken from the feet of a dead Illyri. Syl shivered.

  “Helluva storm,” said Duncan to nobody in particular. “The rivers’s gone and broken its banks.”

  No one replied. Syl already had the feeling that Duncan wasn’t very popular. They all walked onward in silence, sliding over the muddy ground, slipping on the wet grass, sinking ankle-deep into the boggy soil. The hills were lost to sight, but Syl could feel them closing in above their heads, ancient presences towering over these newcomers to their lands, these tiny creatures with their brief, inconsequential life spans.

  Slowly Syl felt her long limbs uncramping, and she found she was easily able to keep up with these small, solid humans. She heard the word freak whispered, even though their dumpy features and beer-swollen bellies, their unshaven skin and angry tattoos were just as alien and unappealing to her. Her nictitating membranes swept over her eyes, and she took in glimmers of infrared and shards of ultraviolet. She even saw the world differently from them. Everything about them—their height, their vision, their hearing, their knowledge of the universe—was so limited compared with her. They judged Syl by the standards of the worst of her kind, hating her even though she herself had done nothing to hurt them. Earlier, a wiry woman called Aggie, one of those who had found Gradus, had stumbled on a rock while walking ahead of Syl. Syl had immediately reached for her to stop her from falling, grasping her arm, and Aggie had sworn at her and pushed her away. If I hated them in the same way, thought Syl, then Paul and Steven would be dead by now. But even
as her thoughts took this turn, she knew that she was being naive; she was one of the invaders, and the fault lay with the Illyri, and, by extension, with Syl herself.

  They walked on, gradually turning north, fording the stream using slippery rocks that were almost entirely submerged by the torrent. Just as the last of the Highlanders was crossing, Syl heard a faint buzzing in the air. She looked to the skies, but the low clouds hid all. She listened harder. She was not mistaken.

  There was a ship in the air, and it was coming closer.

  She looked round at the band of Highlanders, and at Gradus, who was staring at the ground, avoiding the eyes of his captors. This Diplomat represented those who had condemned their boys to death, although had they known just how closely he had been involved with the execution order, Syl believed that even Just Joe would have been unable to save him from their wrath.

  I have to stay with them, thought Syl. I have to trust them, for now.

  “There’s a ship heading this way,” she said loudly.

  Just Joe stopped and looked back at her.

  “What did you say?”

  “There’s a ship coming. I can hear it. It’s not a shuttle, but something bigger. I can tell from the noise of the engine.”

  Duncan, who seemed to have taken it upon himself to shadow her and Paul, looked to the sky. “I cannae hear anything,” he said.

  “If she says she hears something, then she does,” said Paul. “Why would she lie?”

  Just Joe made the decision for all of them.

  “Take cover,” he said.

  While the darksuits were useful, it still made no sense to be caught out in the open by an Illyri vessel. Shrubs and rocks littered the hillside before them. The Highlanders scattered, seeking shelter where they could, keeping their heads down and their faces covered. Syl saw that Aggie and another man had forced Gradus to lie prone on the ground behind a flat rock that stood like an embedded shield in the earth, and were holding guns to his head.

  Now they could all hear the sound, a low roar that grew steadily louder until the ship split the clouds and soared down, raking the land with the powerful beam of its searchlight. It was a cruiser, a troop carrier, and Syl picked out the insignia of the Diplomatic Corps on its side. There would be twenty or thirty heavily armed operatives on board. If anyone caught sight of the Highlanders, they were finished. Sheer force of numbers would overwhelm them.