Last bit of the 07 Nano

The lady kept very still and silent in her corner of darkness. It was at least three floors below ground, yet a steady little breeze had risen in the dark several minutes ago. There could be some ventilation grilles, but she didn’t think so, not without some light filtering through the grilles into the room.

And this wind was no normal wind. It sought her out and found her easily, curling and ruffling over her face and dress. The lady felt unseen fingers brush her cheek with unusual gentleness and affection.

‘Come out, if you please,’ she said, keeping her voice low.

The wind dropped for a moment, and died altogether when footsteps were heard on a stairs somewhere in the dark. The lady turned her head towards the sound in an effort to see. A chink of light appeared, outlining a pair of long thin legs on the stairs.

‘Lady Nyamph,’ said a familiar voice jovially. ‘Doing well, I hope?’

‘I’m fine, thank you, Alpha.’ The wind nudged her arm like a dog, but she ignored it.

‘Perhaps you would care to join me in my rooms above?’

‘And what will I have to pay?’

‘Nothing, my dear.’ The legs stepped the rest of the way down the stairs. A long thin face peered at her out of the light.

‘I won’t co-operate with you, you know,’ she said flatly as the man approached her.

Alpha sighed and chuckled wearily. ‘I know, but won’t do any harm to try eh? And the boy has agreed to work with us.’

‘What have you done to the hostage?’

‘No, the hostage doesn’t know. He isn’t needed right now. I meant Art, of course. You know we always meant Art all this time.’

‘Not the girl.’

‘Oh no, she’s useless as she is. We’re using her to get to her father, as you well know. Stop playing these mind games, Nyamph. We know what you want.’

‘Well what can I do?’ she muttered, getting to her feet.

‘By listening to us, for a start. You’re very confused, my dear.’

‘I’ll listen,’ she said, pulling her hand out of Alpha’s clasp, ‘but confused? Oh no, don’t think you can get that past me.’

‘Ah, odd ideas you have then.’ Alpha bowed and escorted her up the stairs.

The wind followed behind, touching the hem of her dress, slipping silently along her hair and generally making its presence known to her in a reassuring way. She was glad of it, though upon reflection, she realized that someone would have to send him for the wind to get here. Who had the foresight to send the wind here?

‘Ah, here we are.’ Alpha pushed open the large double doors and gestured her in.

She stepped through, registering the smells of polished wood and a fire burning. Her eyes went at once to Art and Iris. The boy turned away, scowling. It didn’t seem like Art – but who knew? And she was partly at fault, she knew, and the boy was getting increasingly impatient and frustrated with her.
‘Here, my lady,’ Omega greeted her, pulling her over to the chair beside him.

She took a seat and waited for him to speak, fixing a quizzical expression on her face to hide her other thoughts. The wind stayed behind her, as slow and docile as a sleeping animal.

‘You are aware of the reason we brought you here?’ Omega continued.

‘Of course.’

‘Well, what do you have to say now?’

‘I won’t give in,’ she replied grimly. ‘Not at all.’

‘Even if it means the death of these two, or the girl’s father, or the hostage?’

‘You are threatening me,’ the lady stated quietly. ‘Why resort to this, Sept?’

‘And why do you not co-operate with us now?’

‘What you have done, and plan to do, are not what I would like to be involved in.’

‘Well you were part of the creation of it.’

‘I thought it would be good,’ the lady said proudly. ‘I thought it would benefit people who would otherwise have not been born. I thought we would profit from the extra commerce and trade.’

‘True, true,’ Omega conceded. ‘But we’ve decided that all those things are of no importance now.’

‘You don’t understand what you’re doing, Sept,’ the lady said wearily. ‘Changing the reality of this world – the mother world itself – would have reverberations over everything.’

‘But we have figured out a way to deal with the consequences,’ Omega explained smoothly.

‘By kidnapping a scientist from one of the subsidiary worlds?’ The lady laughed scornfully into his face.

‘When will you see sense, my lady?’ Alpha spoke up sorrowfully. ‘I thought we had a great thing going.’

She gave him a withering look and turned her full attention back to Omega. The man’s eyes were watching the other parts of the room as though he could see something the others had not spotted.

‘Clever,’ he said.

The wind rose up behind the lady, rattling the chandelier above and causing the fire in the hearth to rise and glow brighter. The lady stood up, her hair and dress blowing wildly about her. The eldest Mr. Sept got up too, his hands twitching.

‘Clever,’ he repeated. This time he sounded much angrier than Art had ever him.

‘With the wind at my back and the sight of Titania!’ the lady shouted into the wind. Her voice hardly rose above the noise of the wind, which grew louder and louder as its intensity increased.

Omega held out a hand into the wind and shut his eyes. Tiny streams of lightning crackled and exploded in the wind, singeing the air in the room. Alpha leapt back and cowered behind the sofa as Theta pulled himself to his feet and stepped up beside Omega.

Art bent low over Iris, who had begun to fidget noiselessly. Rain splattered his back and face, and his eyes were watering in the fierce scouring wind. The lady and the two Mr. Septs had vanished in the wind, which was weaving clouds around them. As he squinted out of the corner of his eye, the wind began to swirl in an anti-clockwise direction with the three within as its center.

‘Get down, idiot!’ Alpha yanked at Art’s arm. ‘Get behind here.’

Art followed, pulling Iris along as best as he could. She cried out once and settled deeper into sleep. Alpha watched the spectacle from behind the safety of the sofa, cheering his two older selves on indiscriminately.

A new voice joined the other indistinct voices. It sounded like the crash of thunder, or the wind howling, or even the dance of raindrops on the roof. It was the voice of the storm at its full force, angry and wild.

‘Omega, you have done a great harm.’

Someone shouted into the wind, but because there was now a spinning vortex in the center of the room, the words were lost in the noise of other things spinning and whipping past.

‘Let them go.’

A fresh burst of electric sizzled outwards from the vortex. Art ducked instinctively, hearing Alpha cry out in surprise and the smell of burning hair joined the cry a few seconds later.

‘The boy?’ The voice sounded surprised, as though the speaker had been caught off-guard.

The wind dropped imperceptibly, and the speed of the vortex lessened and died. Art peered over the top of the sofa carefully, ready to avoid any untoward lightning.

Mr. Sept – there was only one now – had his arms spread wide open. He was laughing, but it was a cold, selfishly pleased sound. The man with the beard standing beside the lady was the storm, Art guessed, and he had his arm on the lady’s elbow. She inclined her head towards him and listened as he whispered into her ear urgently.

‘All right,’ the lady announced after a few long minutes. ‘We’ll trade.’

‘I see.’ Mr. Sept’s eyes glittered as he turned to look at Art. The boy remained where he was, frozen with dread and horror. ‘Art,’ Omega said, ‘come here.’

Alpha poked him painfully in the ribs and pulled Art up roughly. The boy lowered Iris gently to the floor and stumbled over to the three people.

‘The lady has decided to trade, Art,’ Mr. Sept said. ‘She has agreed to give you over in exchange for the girl and her father, with the hostage thrown in for free. What do you say then?’

Art met the lady’s cool eyes. She was angry with him; angry because he had sold her out earlier. He had promised to trust her and follow her, even against what Mr. Sept told him to do – he realized in a burst of understanding, standing before her with his life in her hands, that she had meant him all along to go against Mr. Sept at whatever cost. Something very much like regret crept into the anger, and his conscience was uneasy. It only made him angrier, because she had made him look like a fool.

‘Thank you,’ he merely said, bowing with exaggerated politeness.

‘You’re welcome.’ She nodded formally to him. The air froze between them.

Mr. Sept clapped his hands, smiling widely. ‘And now to business, shall we? Alpha?’

‘Yes, Omega,’ the young man said. He ran straight towards Omega and merged smoothly into him. Mr. Sept shook himself, whole again.

‘Ah, all the pieces together,’ he joked humorlessly. And then turning to Art, he added, ‘You did a good thing, boy. But we won’t need you to talk to the poor man now.’

‘Where shall I be going?’

Mr. Sept took his arm and steered him towards the doors. ‘Why, I’ll show you the labs, of course. And the mechanics of world creation – fascinating stuff, and you would undoubtedly thank me for this wonderful opportunity.’

He stopped abruptly before he reached the doors and glanced over his shoulder. The lady and the man had remained where they were, wordlessly watching Mr. Sept and the boy.

‘Can’t have them running loose, of course,’ Mr. Sept said as an afterthought. He flicked a hand in their direction.

There was a crash, and the air around the lady and man shimmered and danced with sparks. The sparks gathered and formed intricate patterns, combining into a shining cage after several moments. The lady nodded once, twice and looked away.

***
Mr. Sept smiled as he pushed open the only door of the room. The man had his back to it, but he knew it was the door all the same. The door was hidden, and appeared at different corners of the room every day.

‘Get up,’ Mr. Sept said, pushing the man over. ‘We need you now.’

‘I said no,’ the man replied quietly.

‘The boy’s gone back on his words. We’ll bring you up to meet your daughter now.’

The chair fell over loudly as the man stood up abruptly and backed into the opposite wall. He had an old lighter in his hand.

‘A lighter?’ Mr. Sept knocked it out of the man’s trembling hand and grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t be stupid, man. Your daughter’s waiting.’

‘I suppose she’s locked in a room or something, right?’ Mr. Lang wrenched his arm out of the other man’s grip and edged to the other end of the room.

‘No, she’s not,’ Mr. Sept said, losing patience. ‘Come on, man. We’re giving you what you want, meeting that damned daughter you keep raving about. Now!’

‘Why is she with you?’

‘Do you really need to know that?’ Mr. Sept smirked. ‘I won’t tell, it’s not necessary for you to know. Come now, before I lose my patience.’

‘You’re Theta, aren’t you?’ Mr. Lang fought back the arm that swung threateningly past his face.

‘Quite right.’ Mr. Sept aimed another blow to the man’s back, but the man dodged and headed for the door.

‘What has the boy done?’

‘Done? Besides giving you and your daughter up to us? Oh, nothing much.’

The man winced as Mr. Sept’s foot connected with his knee.

‘What about the lady?’ he shouted, dodging another punch.

‘Ah, that was her business.’ Mr. Sept snarled and grabbed the man’s shirt.

There was an unexpected pause. Both men stared at each other over the other’s arms. Mr. Lang stepped back slowly after a few seconds, his hand going to his side.

‘Is that it?’ he whispered, feeling the blood wet his shirt.

‘All there is.’ Mr. Sept grabbed the man’s shoulder and steered him to the door.

The corridors were empty, without any sign of the guards or Mac. Mr. Lang kept his head down on the way up, past rooms with mysterious activity within, and voices drifting past, and lights flickering on and off. The place put him in mind of a hospital. The blood seeped down his side, a few drops landing on the floor as they hurried up more floors.

The wound was not deep; Mr. Sept had merely done that to gain an advantage, to hurt him as a warning. It could have been avoided, maybe, but then he didn’t know what to do then, with the thought that they had killed Emily –

And then they were through the doors, into a room eerily lit with the writhing sparks of a cage with two people in it. Mr. Lang recognized one of them as the lady, but the other was a man. Emily –

The girl lay peacefully asleep on the sofa, an arm obscuring her face. Mr. Sept threw the man down beside the sofa and strode over to the cage.

‘Emily,’ Mr. Lang whispered, pushing the arm off her face, ‘wake up. Emily.’ He shook her gently. The girl remained asleep.

‘What is it?’ the lady said, watching Mr. Sept approached the cage. ‘I thought you were whole.’

‘Not quite,’ Mr. Sept said, touching a fingertip to the cage.

‘Why is the man here?’ the man beside the Dream Lady asked sharply.

‘Mr. Storm.’ Mr. Sept sighed and grinned. ‘How fortunate we are to have you as a guest.’ He glanced over his shoulder to the man and Iris. ‘I suppose we’re letting them have a nice little reunion before everything is tidied up.’

‘You’re going to kill them.’ The lady reached a hand through the sparks and grabbed hold of Mr. Sept’s collar.

Theta stepped back, pulling away the lady’s hand as though it was something repulsive. ‘Oh I don’t know. We might have to.’

***
Mac felt the creatures on his back, but before he had time to react, someone had flung a blindfold over his eyes. A muzzle was shoved roughly over his mouth and nose, and several of those creatures went to work on his legs.

And then there was just silence. Mac felt the creatures slide off his back and flank, and the sounds of someone speaking strangely. A tune played on a flute drifted down to him, as though the flutist was somewhere underwater. He felt the creatures shift and move uneasily around him.

‘Lay down your weapons!’ someone shouted.

A few creatures closest to Mac’s ears snickered; he heard the sounds of knives and several clicks. Someone very small climbed behind his ears and grabbed the fur there painfully.

‘Lay down your weapons!’ the same voice shouted.

More clicks, and something cold and hard brushed against Mac’s legs. He lay on his side, unable to see or hear. The creatures around him were moving quickly now, pushing him to the side of the lane under the hedges.

‘Listen!’ a new voice called. It sounded like a lady. ‘Listen!’

The flute began to play again, a livelier, merrier tune than the first one.

Titania gazed down the lane at the large group of glams disguised as recon elves. They had tied up the cat and shoved him under the hedge. Typical idiots, she thought, yanking her sleeves over her elbows. They never do learn to use another’s strength to their advantage, do they? One bat of the paw from Mac would have knocked out about five of the elves.

The tune picked up speed, climbing higher and higher notes. Several glams nearest to the front clapped their hands to their ears, evidently affected by the tune. A few others came forward to take their place, changing shape into their original forms.

‘A bit higher,’ the Queen muttered to the flutist.

The elf nodded, and brought the tune higher, until the sound was beyond the range of human hearing. A few of the weaker glams dropped their knives and dashed to the back, where they would undoubtedly be doubled over in pain.

The notes climbed higher, and higher, and higher – the glams began to waver, their shapes blurring and distorting as though they were vibrating at high speed. Cries could be heard from them; thin desperate cries begging the Queen to forgive them and stop the noise.

Behind his blindfold, Mac went cross-eyed and hoped fervently that his eardrums were not being perforated by the tune.

‘A little lower,’ Titania said.

The notes dropped slightly, but half the glams were already retching and lying on their backs. The remaining half staggered about blindly, colliding into each other and walking into the hedges.

‘What now?’ Oberon said.

‘Isolate the glams,’ she replied.

The elves moved quickly past her, forming ranks and taking up their positions efficiently. A few went to drag the cat to a safe distance, while some others stalked behind the hedges and pushed out the glams hiding in there. Within minutes the place was swarming with glams and elves, while Oberon and Titania watched and waited.

And in another few more minutes, there was nothing in the lane, not even a trace of cat hair.

‘A dream world, like you said,’ Oberon said, nodding in satisfaction. ‘I pity the poor dreamer who had to witness this scene.’

‘Oh I wouldn’t know, dear,’ Titania laughed, walking through the hedges as though they didn’t exist. ‘People are often odder than we give them credit for.’

And in another few more moments, there was no one there.

The lane went back to its original state, the air still and heavy in the evening heat. Somewhere between the startling green hills in the blue distance, the sun began to set.

***
Iris was dreaming.

She had not dreamt of any of these places and people before – if she had, she knew she would have remembered. How could you explain the presence of a flying machine, so large and heavy, and yet it was able to get up into the sky and take passengers across continents and oceans? And who was this lady who kept turning up, again and again, a lady who looked a bit like her, who said she was her mother, who called her Emily, but yet a person she had never met before?

Where was Art? Was he nearby? She had thought that he was beside her a while ago, but now there was a different person there, someone who was stroking her hair with unaccustomed gentleness –

Did the Dream Lady manage to rescue the poor man from wherever he was? And where was Mr. Sept?

Mr. Lang held the girl and stared morosely at the cage of sparks. Theta had left them fifteen minutes ago, presumably to speak to Omega and Alpha. He didn’t know where Mr. Sept had gone to…no, he did. He was going to die. Somehow the thought didn’t worry him as much as he had thought before.

The lady was beckoning him over now. The other man in the cage with her had vanished inexplicably, and there was now a mysterious wind banging and rushing against the sparks, sending them leaping into the air and dispersing more frequently and fiercely than they had before.

‘Mr. Lang,’ the lady hissed, ‘we need you.’

The man got up reluctantly and dragged his feet to the cage. The wind was threatening to break past the sparks now, but something was clearly holding it back. The lady slid a hand through the lines of sparks to his. He took it unthinkingly.

And then he knew – he didn’t understand, exactly – but he knew. It felt as though he was falling into his own head, his own thoughts, where there was no beginning or end; images and memories slipped past one by one, each one as lucid and vivid as the next. And then he realized that he was not looking at his own memories, but the memories of other people – and they were strange and yet familiar to him. He saw worlds collapsing into themselves, people disappearing where they were, the land ending where it shouldn’t, families torn apart – and now the memories were going past too quickly for him to register each one individually, but he grasped that they had all the same purpose: to show him the ending and breaking of the worlds Mr. Sept had created.
And beneath these images and sounds were the same emotions – fear, anger, confusion, indignation. One thought pushed itself to the fore, drowning the emotions that were beginning to overwhelm him: Stop the boy.

The memories slowed down and speedily trickled into oblivion. Mr. Lang uttered a soft gasp and dropped the lady’s hand.

‘Now do you see?’ she said sadly.

‘Yes,’ he said drunkenly. ‘I do.’

‘Stop the boy,’ she urged. ‘Please.’

‘But Emily – ‘

‘Emily will not be safe if you do not stop the boy!’

‘I will.’ Mr. Lang shuffled to the door, his head down. ‘I will.’

***
‘And that is the machine to give the world a frame,’ Mr. Sept explained. He pointed towards a rather small machine in the unremarkable shape of a cube, with a large black screen taking up one of its sides.

‘And that one,’ the man continued, pointing towards a very large machine under a canvas cover, ‘is where we decide which kinds of people should be included in which worlds. We use this to test our worlds – you can call it a hypothesis machine of sorts – and it saves us the risk and waste of creating a world that will destroy itself within an insubstantial period of time.’

‘Do you create worlds in the present, or right from their beginnings?’ Art leaned over the rail to get a closer look at the lab below.

‘Right from the beginning. And right to the end.’ Mr. Sept clapped his hands and whistled.

Two men emerged from a door and stood in the middle of the lab, looking up at Mr. Sept for the order. One of them had powder down his front; the other was bent over in a hunch, his hand nervously fidgeting in his pocket.

‘Show us how the hypothesis machine works, boys!’

Twilight spork

In pictures.








This be the occupation of my free time.