The Black Rose (17 page)

He was woken by someone shaking him roughly. Twisting, he tried to pull himself into an upright position. He had slumped against the tree and his upper back and neck were bent into stiffness. He cracked his neck and squinted upwards. It was morning, and the person who had shaken him was silhouetted against the sun. He stood and, seeing the person before him, almost fell back again.

“Dannie! What happened?”

The person before him was still recognizably Dannie. However, superficially, she was almost entirely changed. Her skin was the gnarled bark of a tree, and maple leaves on branches sprouted from her head, shoulders, and forearms. Her factory attire was still on, just, though healthy twigs had ripped through the cloth in several places. It dawned on him that she must have used one of the eggs from
The Golden Turtle
to appear this way. He was beginning to wonder why: her identity didn't need protecting, but her next words cut this thought path clean off.

“I'm a fairy!”

“You're a
what?”

“A fairy.” She grinned at him as if nothing better had ever happened to her than discovering she was actually a tree.

“But… but…” Jack struggled to marshal his objection. “How can you be a fairy? You've been a human up until now! With
skin
and everything.”

“Fairies can change their form, remember? Nimue did it, and this lot do it automatically when they move around. One of my parents, or even both, must have been a fairy. I grew up in Albion looking like a human because everyone else did—I needed to blend in. I think it works like a sort of natural camouflage. And
that's
why I can use this!” She rattled the Shard around her neck.

Jack stared at her, speechless. He felt as if a close friend had just come out of the closet. He wasn't ashamed, just surprised, and struggling to compute the fact that someone who was essentially a plant could be so good at mechanics.

He was brought to his senses by Sardâr and Ruth coming to join them. By their nonchalance he supposed they had already seen Dannie's transformation. They both looked more rested than they had the night before, but they shared the same look of perpetual agitation that must have been clear in his face too.

“We need to talk,” Sardâr said, “about what we are going to do.”

Jack nodded.

They followed Dannie in sitting down, cross-legged like children, on the grass.

Sardâr exhaled slowly, the other three watching him intently. “We know Adâ, Hakim, Lucy, and Vince are imprisoned in Nexus. And we've got a black mirror which, it seems, the Emperor doesn't know has been reactivated. We have two Shards, as does the Cult, presuming that they took the one from the Sveta Mountains and that Alex is also imprisoned there—and one is in the balance because of Bál's predicament. It seems the two sides are fairly evenly matched.”

Sardâr paused, gathering his thoughts. “The Cult would think it suicidal for a small group of Apollonians to mount an espionage mission on Nexus—which is why it just might work. We are not well prepared, but then we could never hope to fight the Cult in an open battle: there are far too few of us. But we may never get another opportunity to finally find Nexus. We can use the mirror to track the world's location and free our friends. We can then regroup, having had an inside look at the enemy's base.”

“I guess this goes above and beyond a humanitarian intervention, then?” Ruth commented wryly. “Are you thinking we'd take
The Golden Turtle?”

“Yes. It's sturdier and stealthier than any of our other dimension ships.”

“How many of us?”

“Not so many to attract attention. You, Jack, and I and potentially Gaby or Malik. Remember, once we liberate the others, our group will double in number, so we'll be a lot more noticeable.”

Ruth and Jack nodded. Though the prospect of assailing Nexus was daunting, it seemed like the right thing to do. Alex was there, and now Lucy and the others. One of the main reasons he'd joined the Apollonians had been to help rescue Alex: now it seemed they might have a chance.

“So what about you, Dannie? Are you going to stay here with your people or go back and finish off Fred Goodwin?”

“What, you think I'm not coming too?” She grinned. “Goodwin's a tiny fish in a massive lake, and now you're going off to harpoon the whale. You're not shaking
me
off anytime soon!” Dannie's infectious smile spread to the other three.

“You're very welcome to join us,” Sardâr replied. “I'm sure we'll sorely need the Third Shard in the coming days.”

Their departure was fairly swift. The fairies had spent the day so far assessing the damage to the surrounding forest and working on alchemy to regenerate the trees. It looked like it would be a long job but not beyond their capabilities. The four Apollonians gathered as many of them as possible to tell them of their plans, thanking them for the Third Shard. After Dannie promised to visit at the next opportunity, they left the glade and retraced their route to the river.

Ruth and Dannie strode ahead, discussing the mechanics of
The Golden Turtle.
Jack and Sardâr followed at a slower pace.

“So Dannie's a fairy, then?” Jack broke the awkward silence, acutely aware of their disagreement the previous day.

“It would appear so,” the elf replied. “I had my suspicions as soon as she attained the Third Shard. It seems each Shard latches onto a person the same race as that which protects it, perhaps even the same race as the original bearer.”

“And she can transform?”

“Not
transform,
as such. Merely camouflage. But that's no great surprise.” He reached inside his tunic and pulled out one of the golden eggs from
The Golden Turtle.
“We developed this technology from fairy alchemy. I say
developed;
I really mean
stole.
As I've made far too clear, the fairies I've had past contact with haven't been…” He swallowed. “I'm sorry about what I said yesterday. It was wrong. I know you expect more of me.”

Jack nodded. “That's okay. I forgive you.”

They continued in silence for several minutes before Sardâr spoke again. “Jack… What you did to Nimue…”

“I know it was wrong. I'm sorry—”

“No, I quite sympathize with the emotions. Only… did you see
what
you were doing?”

It took a moment for the truth to dawn on Jack. “That… that was Dark alchemy, wasn't it?”

Sardâr nodded slowly. “I recognize that it was an exceptional situation, but it would be wise to restrain that side of things in the future. We've seen all too clearly where that path leads…”

Jack continued on in silence, troubled. What concerned him most was the knowledge that this hadn't been the first time. He had thought he'd only been that enraged when Alex had been abducted, but now he remembered another occasion: facing the demon inside Mount Fafnir. At that point, he had been lent alchemical strength far beyond his capabilities. Sardâr had put it down to the influence of the Seventh Shard, but now Jack wasn't so sure. It was an emotion his memory most strongly associated with Icarus, Alex's kidnapper. He wasn't sure that, when he and the Cultist inevitably came face-to-face once again, he'd be able to control it.

They reached the riverbank. Ruth must have called ahead, because the golden dome had surfaced and the ramp was already stretched out as a bridge.

Quentin stood next to the hatch. “Jolly good, you fellows made it out of there alive, then?”

“Yeah, cheers for the help, guv'na,” Dannie said as she scrambled up the ramp and disappeared down the hatch. “We almost got crushed by a giant spider cannon. Where were you lot?”

Quentin ignored her. “Where, might I ask, is Mister Thorin?”

Sardâr motioned for Quentin to climb down and began to explain what had happened to Bál. Jack followed, leaving only Ruth.

She looked up at the forest, the trees like a bank of glistening emeralds in the morning sun. It was so idyllic here, yet they were about to depart for the place she least wanted to visit. Her nightmares had become more frequent, as if reaching a crescendo before her return to Nexus. She thought she might find some answers there about her past, yet she was afraid what she might discover.

Taking one last sweeping look at the landscape, she clambered down the metal ladder and slammed the hatch shut.

Alex was sick after using Dark alchemy for the first time. He had fainted and awoken in his bed and spent the following day sliding in and out of uneasy sleep. But worse than the physical sickness was his disgust with himself. He didn't know what was more disturbing: that he had stooped to the Emperor's level or the ease with which he had done so.

His captor visited him a few days later, and they repeated the exercise. Alex had vowed to keep strong and not allow it to happen again, but he sensed in the pit of his stomach that he could not promise this to himself. And it
did
happen again and again and again, every time the Emperor struck out at him and invoked his past against him. Each time, Alex's pretensions to resistance were shattered by a renewal of the anger simmering just below the surface. Something had snapped within him, some control valve, and he felt he had become the conduit for a raging current.

Several training sessions later, all concept of time having evaporated, the Emperor came to Alex and told him they were going elsewhere. Receiving only silence, like so many times before, in response to his protestations to know what was going on, he followed his captor down the steps and out of the Cathedral.

They were on a thin walkway, supported by columns, stretching high above the city to a skyscraper on the other side. Alex had been here before, and with aversion he recognized the Precinct of Despair: the high-security containment facility in which he had first been imprisoned. Was he, after all this, to be thrown back into a cell?

No. They reached the elevators and, after a retinal scan, were admitted to an open-air cube which plunged downwards, far lower than Alex's cell had been, penetrating the deepest parts of the facility, beneath street level, into the rock on which Nexus was suspended.

The lift slowed and stopped, and the doors flashed open with a metallic clang. This was, as far as Alex could tell, the lowest level in the building, perhaps in the entire city. The corridor was lit by the same neon glow as above, with only a single door at the opposite end. As they approached, Alex became aware of echoing screams, which all seemed to emanate from the other side of the door. He shivered.

The Emperor pressed a key on a panel to the right, and the door slid open. The screams became instantly more pronounced. With trepidation, Alex joined the Emperor on the other side of the door.

The chamber was colossal, perhaps even bigger than the Cathedral. Cells, cubes of about five feet square, were stacked next to and on top of one another to create walls of clinically lit glass stretching as high and as far as he could see. In the wide central aisle, black-cloaked Cultists moved about or floated among cells on levitating platforms. The cacophony of wailing was intense; the prisoners within sounded as if they were being faced with the greatest agony they could possibly endure.