Herbie Brennan - Faerie Lord

The demons were by her side. Blue jerked away on reflex – she could never get used to the speed with which the creatures moved… or her basic revulsion to the breed. But they meant her no harm, of course. Their red eyes were staring outwards, their bodies in defensive posture. These were her subjects now, whether she liked it or not, and they would protect her without a single thought for their own lives.

Blue followed the direction of their gaze to find out what had triggered the alert. The gruesome battlefield stretched out dismally in all directions, but there was a figure silhouetted on a distant hillock, and the fact that it was upright meant it was no illusion. The demons were watching it intently, chittering softly to each other in those curious lobster-claw clicks they used in places where telepathy was blocked.

‘At ease,’ Blue said softly. It made little difference. Both her guardians were aquiver, watching the approaching figure like cats focused on a bird. She had a horror that one day they would disembowel an innocent, perhaps some poor subject who pressed forward to present a petition. So far it hadn’t happened: demonic discipline was extraordinary. But she still worried.

The figure was a messenger. She could tell by the curious loping gait as it approached. As it came closer, it resolved itself into a trance-runner, prominently identified by the insignia of his Guild. The man’s eyes were fixed on a point high in the sky, while his right hand clutched an ornate ceremonial dagger that he plunged up and down as if it were a staff. Somehow he managed to avoid all obstacles.

‘Stand down,’ Blue ordered firmly. The dagger, if nothing else, might have triggered an attack, but the demons would not move now unless she was directly threatened.

Although the runner could not possibly have seen her, he swerved to stop a few discreet yards away. Light alone knew how far he had come, but he was not even breathing heavily. His eyes gradually lowered and regained their spirit; then he sank to his knees. ‘Majesty,’ he said, extending his dagger, hilt first.

Blue took the weapon. The gesture was symbolic of the fact that the Guildsman meant her no harm, but it was more than that. Deftly she unscrewed the top of the dagger and shook a scrap of parchment out of the hollow hilt. There was a moment as the embedded security spells sensed her essence; then the parchment expanded into a standard Palace message scroll.

As Blue began to read, her eyes widened in sudden alarm.

Since coffee had a psychedelic affect on faeries, Henry brewed them all a pot of tea. Nymph stared into her mug with suspicion, but Pyrgus had had it before and drank his in great draughts as he explained.

‘The Faeries of the Night organise their own health services and I’m afraid there still isn’t much communication between theirs and ours. Not that I think it would have made much difference. I can’t see why our people would have spotted anything amiss either. The very first case, the first one we know about anyway, was a kid called Jalindra and everybody thought she’d just caught the horse-sniffles. All Cretch kids get horse-sniffles sooner or later and the early symptoms are similar.’

Mr Fogarty, while he was still in residence, had amassed a peculiar assortment of mugs. The one Henry had given to Pyrgus featured a flock of poultry listening intently to one of their number who was singing. The title of the picture, running underneath the rim, was The Bantam of the Opera. He watched as Pyrgus set it to one side and went on seriously. ‘Jalindra was four years old when she caught the bug. A year later she was a middle-aged woman. Six months after that she was dead.’ He stared down at the table top and added, ‘From old age.’

‘We have that here,’ Henry said. ‘Premature aging. It’s called…’ He searched his memory for the name and surprised himself by finding it. ‘… Werner’s Syndrome. There was something about it on telly a couple of weeks ago. It’s a gene thing apparently. The youngsters never grow very much and they go grey and wrinkled while they’re still children and they get old people’s diseases like heart attacks and cataracts and they all die young.’ He set his own mug to one side. It had a fish motif below the words Cod Moves in Mysterious Ways.

But Pyrgus was shaking his head. ‘Not the same thing. This one has been spreading through the population. Not just Faeries of the Night, either. Faeries of the Light as well.’

‘Like Pyrgus,’ Nymph put in.

Henry became aware of a tightening in the pit of his stomach, as if he’d suddenly begun to feel afraid. Which he had. He didn’t want Pyrgus to have some ghastly disease that reduced his lifespan to eighteen months. He glanced at his friend and realised suddenly he now looked far more like his father, the old Purple Emperor, than he did like the boy Henry had known. It was creepy as well as scary. Henry said hesitantly, ‘But you’re not…? I mean, they’ve found a cure, haven’t they? You’re not, like – ’ he gave a sudden, very false laugh ’ – going to die or anything?’

‘No, he’s not,’ said Nymph firmly.

Henry looked at her. He didn’t like the fact she was the one who’d answered him. But before he could say anything else, Pyrgus was talking again. ‘Let me tell you the whole thing, Henry,’ he said easily. ‘It’s a bit tricky and I want you to understand.’

Understand what? Llenry thought. But he only said soberly, ‘Go on.’

Pyrgus said, ‘This isn’t a disease like anything we’ve ever seen in the Realm before. It isn’t in the medical records, and there’s nothing like it in our history. It started in the Cretch with poor Jalindra and moved outwards. It was a very slow spread at first. The healers thought it was a rare condition and didn’t pay much attention. Actually – ’ He stopped suddenly and licked his lips.

‘What?’ Henry asked.

A look of embarrassment crept over Pyrgus’s face. ‘To be honest, in the early days nearly everybody thought it was a Faerie of the Night disease – only Faeries of the Night could get it. Because that’s the way it looked.’ He shifted in his chair. ‘There’s still a lot of prejudice against Faeries of the Night. Blue’s doing all she can, but you can’t really make up laws about that. It all comes down to the way people think. And you can’t really blame them for being prejudiced against Faeries of the Night after all the stuff Hairstreak did.’

‘No,’ Henry agreed. He was a bit prejudiced against Faeries of the Night himself.

‘Anyway,’ Pyrgus said on a whistling out-breath, ‘by the time we did start to take it seriously, by the time Faeries of the Light started to get sick, it had spread too widely for us to tackle the problem by isolation. So the healing wizards had to study it properly and what they found out was weird.’

‘Really weird,’ Nymph said with emphasis.

Pyrgus leaned forward. ‘The thing is, Henry, this disease doesn’t just make you look old, or mess up your body so you go wrinkled and grey. The healers are calling it TF – temporal fever. It actually interferes with time. You start to live your life faster than you should.’

Henry blinked. ‘I don’t think I followed that.’

Pyrgus sat back in his chair again. ‘No, it’s not all that easy. Look, imagine you caught it from me – ’ He noticed Henry’s expression and added quickly, ‘Which you can’t; I’ll explain why in a minute. But imagine you had it now. Every so often, you’d come down with bouts of fever. Then you’d sink into a coma. We’d put you to bed and wait for you to come out of it and if it lasted for more than a day or so, we’d watch you getting older. That’s what happens from the outside. But inside – what you experience – it’s completely different. You don’t know you’re lying in a bed at all. Once the coma starts, everything around you suddenly speeds up. You find yourself thinking and doing things at breakneck speed. If you’d planned to go away on holiday tomorrow, that’s what you’d do. And you’d race around doing holiday stuff, but instead of it all taking weeks, it would all be over in a few seconds. You see?’