Mike Shevdon - The Road to Bedlam

Now, though, I stood in two worlds. In the physical world I could see the light as it fizzed and crackled and then glowed, but in the shadow world that overlaid it, the spark looked entirely different. It was a distortion in space, a lensing of reality where everything collapsed into the spark. Space bent inwards around the star as matter collapsed into it, releasing fierce energy. Raffmir urged the star forward and it drifted into the lab, floating on the air like a feather on the breeze. He swung the door shut behind it and the star glowed brighter.

"Dogstar, shield your eyes and those of your daughter. He turned his back to the star as its brightness grew.

"My work," said Watkins. "All my work."

"I would advise you both to avert your eyes," said Raffmir. Petrokos turned his face into the corner, covering his eyes with his hands. Watkins continued to watch the lab.

I covered Alex's eyes with my hand, bowing over her and shielding my own eyes against the painful brightness. Even then I could see the bones in my hand when the flash came. There was a cracking, popping crescendo, the sound of tinkling glass from the lab, and it was dark again.

I blinked, lurid green spots obscuring my vision. There was a scuffling sound as Petrokos ran for the door. I grabbed the hilt of my sword and went after him, still blinking away the luminous afterglow. As I reached the doorway, Raffmir stopped me. "Let him go. His patients are waiting for him in the darkened corridors."

Raffmir caught Watkins by the scruff of the neck and dragged him forward. He stumbled, eyes staring sightlessly, still mumbling about his work.

"What, cousin, would you have me do with this?" He shook Watkins, but all resistance had left him.

Part of me still wanted revenge, but there had been enough death already to satisfy any lust for blood. "Let him go. He can find his fate with the other one." I nodded after Petrokos and the darkened corridor.

"But what of his reward?"

"Reward?"

"Indeed. You do not yet know the full enormity of the good doctor's work. Tell him, Watkins."

The doctor looked back towards the lab, though it was clear he was seeing nothing. Things smouldered on benches. There were scorch marks dimly visible on the fridges. He shook his head.

"Oh, come now. This is no time for false modesty." Raffmir turned to me, "Your daughter was to be only the beginning of this man's crowning achievement." He shook Watkins again. The man was a rag doll. If Raffmir hadn't been holding him up, I think he would have collapsed to his knees.

"Tell my cousin what you made," Raffmir insisted, and shook him again.

The sword appeared from nowhere in Raffmir's hand. Raffmir released him and Watkins wobbled on his feet, but he did not have a chance to fall. Raffmir whirled on the spot and the blade sliced in under his chin and his head snapped back, the blood spraying around the glass walls. It splattered over the floor, Raffmir and Alex and me, running down the glass in sticky rivulets.

"That seems a poor reward," I told him.

Raffmir leaned on the end of the central table and used the sleeve of his coat to wipe the blade.

He looked up. "The coat is ruined anyway," he said with a shrug.

The sound of repeated gunshots came from the corridor.

"We need to get out of here," I reminded him.

I made to move forward, but Raffmir lowered the sword point level with my chest. "Not quite yet."

"I thought you did not need to be reminded of your oath."

"I don't, but I must remind you of yours."

"Why?"

He held up two small glass vials in his free hand.

"This is the culmination of the good doctor's work," he said. "Twenty years' dedication." He looked down at the headless body. "No wonder he was upset."

"Souvenir?" I asked.

"There is not one sample here, but two. The first is the one intended for your daughter and would surely have killed her, though we can allow that the good doctor might finally have reached his goal and cured her – it remains untried, after all."

"She's not sick, Raffmir, she's fey."

"Half-fey, or a quarter, or a hundredth part, but not fey."

"Whatever."

"No, there is a difference, and that difference is everything. The second vial contains the weaponised version of the cure. A strange word, is it not? Weaponised? No, don't worry. I am not intending to use it on you, though if it got broken it would quickly be fatal for both you and your daughter. It would be a very unwise thing to attack me when I hold so delicate an object, Dogstar." He lowered the point of his sword, confident now that I would not fight him.

"What do you want with it, then?" I asked him.

"Fear. That's what drives them. They live such short and fragile lives that they are governed by fear; driven by it."

Gunfire stuttered in the corridor behind me. "We do not have time for this, Raffmir."

He stayed relaxed, ignoring the approaching sounds of conflict. "They fear not only us, but each other. What if another nation has fey? What if they are secretly coaching their own squads of half-breeds in the arts of intelligence gathering, assassination, insurrection?"

"There are no other fey. Are there?"

Raffmir smiled. "They don't know, and not knowing drives them. It's the fear of the possible. What if someone else has found a way to control it – indeed, to create super-soldiers to use against them? Enormous strength, stealth, strange powers – it's a dream and a nightmare. That's what made it so easy to manipulate them, their fear and their greed. With a gift of funding and resources, they were easy to subvert. We are not their enemy, after all."

I glanced towards the corridor, expecting the sound of approaching feet at any moment.

"So in their search for a cure they discovered by accident a way to destroy the half-breeds: a manipulation of genes and viruses, a manufactured disease."

"The Feyre don't get sick, Raffmir, you know that."

"This is true. If I drank the serum, even if I used a hypodermic to inject it, there would be no effect on me whatsoever. I am fey and neither of these vials are intended for me." He smiled. "In one of the vials, though, is an agent, a viral contagion, cultured to be as infectious as a common cold and passed from human to human. They barely notice it, and the fey are immune to that too – the true fey, that is."

"I don't understand."

"The weapon is a contagion aimed at the mongrels. Its effect is the same as if your daughter had participated in the experiment. It releases the magic within so that it consumes the host. Any mongrel that contracts the disease will die quickly and cleanly. Once released, it will spread through the human population as no more than an inconvenience – a day in bed at worst – but it will wipe out any and all of the half-breeds like a virulent plague."

I shook my head, trying to understand the scope of such a thing. "A weapon against the half-breeds? Why would you need such a thing?"

"It is their safeguard against a mongrel army being pitched against them – a last line of defence, but it will serve the Seventh Court just as well."

Then I saw the flaw in his plan. "You can't use it – if you do then Alex or I might become infected. You have sworn by fey law to harm neither of us. You can't use it without breaking your vow, and you can't give it to anyone else to use, either. If you do, you are in violation of fey law and your life is forfeit, as is your honour."

"A prize almost worth dying for, were that necessary."

"Almost?"

"I am giving you notice to quit. You have forty-eight hours to leave this world."

"What are you talking about?"

"You have the means, Dogstar. We are not as ignorant as you think. You have the Dead Knife from the Quit Rents Ceremony, and with that you can cleave the gaps between the worlds. You can use it to travel across the cosmos as we did, when we were forced into exile. You can go as far away as you want, and take your daughter and that pregnant bitch with you."