Elysium Fire

  Sparver was yanked from the ground in one smooth movement, the speaker letting out only a tiny grunt of effort as he bore Sparver’s weight. “Now, pig-man. Stand. At least we can make an effort to look each other in the eye, can’t we?”

  Blood still smeared the m-suit visor. Now he was standing, it began to run off the self-cleaning surface. Through this dissipating pink film, Sparver stared at the man who had hauled him off the ground.

  He was familiar and yet not so. He had the face of Devon Garlin, but there was a maturity to it that was absent from the face of the public figure. The countenance was slightly broader and heavier, somewhat more blemished and lined, markedly more characterful, as if it had lived more and seen more than its bland public counterpart. The eyes were wearier, sunk more deeply in their sockets, the skin around them more elaborately wrinkled, the eyelids heavier and more sagging. There was no scar beneath the right eye. Above the eyes the brow had more lines to it, and the forehead was more prominent, the hair wirier and starting further up the scalp. Sparver might not have been the best at telling humans apart, but even with his limitations he felt that this was unquestionably the face of the same man, but with decades more life added to it, and little evidence of rejuvenative procedures being used to undo the effects of ageing.

  Beneath the head, a thick, muscular neck, a barrel-chested torso, strong arms and shoulders, the sturdy, top-heavy physique barely concealed beneath a plain black outfit of trousers and tunic, devoid of frills or ornamentation. And yet unquestionably the face and body of the same man he had helped detain in Fuxin-Nymburk.

  “How are you here, Devon?” Sparver asked.

  Puzzlement pushed a notch into the man’s forehead. “Why do you call me that?”

  “Because I’ve seen you before. Everyone has. You’re Julius Devon Garlin Voi.”

  “And yet by your tone you seem not to be wholly certain of that assertion.”

  “I took you to Panoply. You’ve been there ever since.”

  The man bit down on his lower lip, ruminating on this point. “Then it would seem unlikely that I am here as well, would it not?”

  “You’re older. Bulkier. But I’ve seen your face on a thousand broadcasts.”

  “And your point is?” The man still had his hand on Sparver’s neck, but he released it now. Then, with a detached, practical manner, as of one cleaning the face of a clock, or brushing dust from a portrait, he began to unpeel the front of Sparver’s visor. The m-suit material was tearing and shrivelling at the touch of his fingers, breaking away in smoky threads. “There, there,” the man said. “You don’t need this encumberment, not here. You can breathe easily without it, and at least we can look each other squarely in the eye, can’t we?”

  “How are you doing that?” Sparver asked, as the man dabbed away more and more of the m-suit, flicking its gluey traces off the tips of his fingers like someone punching through a cobweb.

  “You established the nature of the jungle and the cats, didn’t you? It’s all quickmatter, just like this suit of yours, and there’s nothing I can’t do with quickmatter. I am just willing it to surrender its integrity, and so it does.” The man smiled: it was the smile Sparver had come to despise like a repeated lash against old, raw nerve endings. “But don’t fear, pig-man. I haven’t allowed you to come all this way just to kill you now.”

  Sparver forced himself to take in Perec’s body, what he could see of it, her tactical armour melted and deformed where the quickmatter had attacked it. “Then why did they have to die?”

  “I only needed a single witness. You’re as good as any. Better, as I have said, in that you are more blameless than many. Are you blameless, pig-man? What’s your title, exactly?”

  “Prefect Bancal. And you are under Panoply observance.”

  “Yes—good. I admire your rectitude, your devotion to the calling, against all the visible odds. But your friends are dead, Prefect, and you are powerless. Turn around, will you?”

  When Sparver did not turn around, the man took him by the shoulders and forced him to obey.

  He studied the pale pearl-white gleam of the Shell House, its spiralling, organically inspired contours.

  “Do you recognise it, Prefect Bancal?”

  “I don’t know. How many guesses do I get?”

  The man punched Sparver in the small of his back. The force of the punch sent Sparver sprawling forward, snout down in the dirt, feeling as if a battering ram had just been driven into the base of his spine. The man’s shadow fell over him again, then he felt fingers close around the scruff of his neck once more. But there was no m-suit to muffle the hold now, and the pain of fingers digging into flesh made Sparver let out a small shocked grunt, even as he landed back on his feet.

  “Ground rules,” the man said. “You are here at my sufferance, Prefect, and my forbearance is not without its limits. There is nothing so fragile as the tolerance of a man who knows with complete conviction that he is going to die.”

  “Do you?” Sparver asked, wheezing out the words.

  “Well, of course. They won’t let me live, will they? Not now, when there is so little to be gained by not allowing me to die. They will decide that any operatives still present in Lethe are regrettably expendable—understandable, given the lack of contact—and order Lethe’s total destruction. We both know they have the means. The remaining Wildfire cases will die, as Panoply surely knows, but they will console themselves that nothing could be done to save those people anyway.”

  “You’re wrong. We have a plan to save them. It’s already working.”

  “How little you know,” the man said, almost fondly, as if he might pat Sparver on the head at any moment. “The means to preserve those people lies with me, not Panoply. Every day, every hour, by force of will, I choose to permit them to live. I am in their heads, whispering the spell that stops them from dying. If I cease to whisper that spell—because I choose not to, or because I am dead—then they will die. It is as simple as that.”

  “I don’t see what you’d gain from being dead.”

  “You misunderstand my intentions. I have already achieved all that I desired. The Wildfire emergency has sown terror and confusion, and it is not yet finished. No one, even you, can really be sure who is next. Does it really end with the names on the list? I’ll let you in on a little secret, shall I? I only ever touched those two thousand citizens. No one else need fear Wildfire, when it finally burns through that list of names. There will be no more deaths, at least not as a direct consequence of the clinic. I’ll have had my justice. But it won’t end there, not for Panoply, not for the Glitter Band. Public confidence in your organisation couldn’t be lower, Prefect. But it’s only going to get worse, when the people see how ineffective you were in the face of this emergency. The breakaway movement will hasten. There will be misjudgements … over-reactions on both sides. Regrettable acts. Provocation and counter-provocation. Wiser minds will attempt to slow the fragmentation, even turn it back. But that wheel, once started turning, will not be easy to stop. The Glitter Band will begin to destroy itself, riven by centrifugal forces of naked greed and craven self-interest.”

  “I’m glad you’ve thought this through.”

  This drew wry amusement from the man, rather than another punch to the spine. “Oh, I have. Thoroughly. But unlike my brother—the man you think you know, the man whose face reminded you of my own—unlike him, I’m under no illusions that there is an upside to this chaos. Caleb, you see, for all his faults—and there are many—Caleb still has an idealistic streak. Mistaken, foolhardy, but sincerely held. He thinks he can make the world a better place, and I have helped him along in that conviction. Opened doors for him, you might say. Given him a little helping hand, without his knowledge.”

  “Who is Caleb?”

  “You know him, Prefect. Weren’t you the one who detained him?”

  “I detained Julius Devon Garlin Voi,” Sparver said.

  “No,” the man answered. “That was Caleb. I ought
to know. I am Julius Devon Garlin Voi. I am and always have been.”

  “Load it,” Dreyfus said.

  Prefect Singh primed the crossbow, latched it and slid the dart back into its groove, folding a small retaining clip down over it.

  “Did you really make this?” she asked Garlin.

  “Yes.” He nodded, something between shame and pride in his features. “I could make another one now, if we had time. It’s just quickmatter. I was always pretty good at conjuring it. I wasn’t the best, though …”

  “Caleb was,” Dreyfus said, drawing a reproachful glance from Garlin. Yet no contradiction, for now.

  “Who are you, sir?” Singh asked.

  “He’s Devon Garlin,” Dreyfus answered, guessing that she had already worked out most of the truth for herself. “Julius Devon Garlin Voi. Presently a witness in the Wildfire emergency. Julius was raised here, Deepa, along with his brother Caleb. It’s an exact copy of the Voi residence in Chasm City. Julius doesn’t remember too much of what happened. But it’s starting to become clearer. Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t remember Caleb,” Garlin said—but without the flat denial of earlier. “But I do know this place. And there was always someone else here. I didn’t play those games on my own.” He paused, swallowed. “There was a game that involved hunting. I … one of us … made animals. We chased them down for sport. But it wasn’t like that cat. They weren’t solid, they weren’t real. They were just figments.”

  “Consensual hallucinations,” Dreyfus said. “Real enough to the eye, but incapable of harming you back. Something obviously changed, though.”

  “That’s what I wanted to do,” Garlin said wonderingly. “Make them realler. I told him … Caleb … what I could do with quickmatter, if I had half the chance. I knew I could make a place like this, make a better kind of game. But this place isn’t anything to do with me, Dreyfus. You have to believe it.”

  Dreyfus looked at him, gave a slow but considered nod. “I do. For once, I’ll take you at your word. This is hard for you, I know. But we have to see it through.”

  “You really think he’s here?”

  “I think he’s been here for a very long time, Julius.” Dreyfus turned to face Singh. “You say there hasn’t been any contact with the other party since the trouble started. Do you think you can retrace their steps?”

  Singh pointed to an area of the clearing, near the jungle wall. “There was a path into the jungle, but it came and went.”

  Dreyfus directed a question at the waiting whiphound. “Can you retrace Prefect Singh’s movements based on her tracker?”

  The whiphound nodded, projecting a drunken scrawl onto his faceplate. There was a scribble of dense movement around their present location, then a meandering, looping trail which went out and back again. The general thrust of the course was towards the middle of the dome, but Singh had still had some way to go when she turned back.

  “Get us to the point where the party separated,” Dreyfus said. “Straightest possible route. Forward scout mode, five-metre secure zone. Proceed.”

  The whiphound moved off, heading to the spot in the jungle wall that Singh had indicated. Dreyfus followed, but kept a wary distance, holding his hand up to urge Singh and Garlin to exercise the same caution, not that either of them were exactly straining to dive into the jungle.

  “Dreyfus …” Garlin began, sounding very much like a man about to unburden himself of a confession.

  “Later,” Dreyfus said.

  The whiphound met the wall, whisking its filament in a fan-shaped blur, like a rattlesnake reversing with its tail upraised. Brilliant flecks of green began to fly away from the cutting edge. The whiphound started to excavate a low, stoop-ceilinged tunnel into the jungle mass. Dreyfus watched, saying nothing, trusting in nothing. He had no expectation of success. But he could not very well lecture Singh on the demands of field service if he himself did not explore all possible opportunities, however doubtful they appeared.

  “Dreyfus. Listen to me. There’s something near us. I can tell.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. A prickly feeling that we’re being watched. But more definite than that. Look, you’ve been trying to convince everyone I have secret powers until now. Don’t be the one to doubt me when I tell you I can sense something.”

  “I know they’re still out there,” Singh said. “Is it working, Prefect Dreyfus?”

  “Too soon to be sure,” he said.

  The whiphound had burrowed five or six metres into the jungle. It was still moving, and the tunnel walls—cut back neatly, like ornamental hedges—were not yet closing in after it. But Dreyfus knew there was nothing special about his whiphound, compared to the units the others had been carrying.

  Now pink and blue sparks lit the green tunnel.

  “It’s encountering resistance. It won’t be safe for us to follow.” Dreyfus reached out, opening his hand in a clear retrieval gesture. “Come back,” he stated, just in case the whiphound needed persuading.

  The whiphound abandoned its cutting and began to retreat along the tunnel. It was slower than it should have been, as if some damage had already been done to its core systems. With a certain numb resignation Dreyfus watched as a vine extended itself from the wall and snagged the whiphound. The vine coiled around it. Then the whiphound was gone, snatched into the green mass, a flash and a flicker showing through the foliage.

  “We think one of the other whiphounds blew up,” Singh said. “I don’t know if Prefect Bancal and the others got away in time. Perhaps we should get back down in the pit, in case this one explodes.”

  “That’s the last place we want to be,” Dreyfus said. “We still need to find a way out of this clearing.” He unclipped his second whiphound and set it on a cordon patrol, lapping around the party but refraining from straying too close to the clearing’s edge. Then he raised his voice to a shout. “Caleb! Can you hear me? I’m certain you know we’re here. There’s no reason for you not to.”

  He lowered his voice before it turned hoarse, his breath fogging the m-suit visor until it cleared itself.

  “Or for me to shout through this suit, I suppose,” he added, more softly. “If you’re there at all, you’ll be aware of every word we’ve said.”

  “You sound like a mad man,” Garlin said. “Screaming at the trees.”

  “I’m hoping to persuade your brother to grant us an audience.”

  “You don’t even know if he’s real, let alone that he’ll want to speak to us.”

  “To us, maybe not,” Dreyfus admitted. “But to you? Why wouldn’t he jump at the chance of a brotherly reunion? Although I suppose that rather depends on what led to the two of you going your separate ways, and you with no memory of him.”

  “Dreyfus,” Singh said sharply.

  He turned, picking up the warning in her voice. A low black form was taking shape near the fallen cat. It seemed to puddle out of the green, coalescing out of convergent threads of liquid blackness, clotting together into a single animal whole.

  The whiphound detected its presence and deflected its cordon patrol to approach the cat.

  “Wait until it’s nearer,” Dreyfus said quietly, as Singh made to raise the crossbow. “I trust your aim. But the bolt will have more power the nearer it is.”

  “It was just luck, the first time.”

  “I doubt it very much, Deepa. You knew what to do then and you know what to do now. But make the shot count. It’s all we have.”

  The cat was now fully whole, the last of the black strands separating from the jungle and vanishing into the animal’s voidlike silhouette. It prowled to the fallen cat, sniffing around it with a brittle, easily distracted curiosity. It touched a paw to the blackness, two voids connected. Then it withdrew. If it detected some kinship in the murdered creature, the effect was slight and soon forgotten.

  The cat locked its attention onto Dreyfus, Singh and Garlin. Two eyes, the white teeth. It walked closer, one footfall then two, with a
slow but gaining intent, until its steps became strides, the strides elongating, the cat seeming to flatten itself into a perfect moving darkness, following an invisible parabola. The whiphound intercepted it, the cat pawing it aside with an effortless disregard, the whiphound sparking and flashing as it fell to the ground, writhing like a poisoned snake.

  Then the cat was running, and Singh levelled the crossbow.

  “Wait …” Dreyfus mouthed.

  But Singh knew better, for she had done this once before. The crossbow snapped and the dart launched itself into the cat. It was fast: very fast. Dreyfus barely had time to track it, before it sank into the cat’s chest, just below the neck.

  It was a good shot. The cat dropped with a sudden, conclusive urgency, as if cables had yanked it to the ground. He should have trusted Singh to know what she was doing.

  “I’ll get the dart,” Dreyfus said, fixing his eyes on the spot where it had gone in.

  “No,” Singh said.

  There was another cat, clotting into solidity at the clearing’s edge. In that instant Dreyfus knew with total certainty there would never be time to retrieve the dart.

  The cat attacked, duplicating the slow but rising tempo of the other, but this time with nothing to stop it. No whiphound, no dart, no armour that would make the slightest difference against a weapon made of predatory quickmatter.

  Garlin raised a hand, palm flattened and upraised. Through his m-suit Dreyfus saw a tremble and a curl to his lip, a sneer of cold command. Garlin’s arm stiffened. The cat increased its run, arcing and flexing like a black banner behind a kite. And then stopped, not out of its own volition, but because it had run into an invisible surface, the cat pouring its momentum against that impasse, spreading in concentric waves, losing form and coherence.