Rod Rees - The Demi-Monde - Winter

How odd.

‘It’s glowing!’

‘Everything made out of Mantle-ite glows in the dark. In the dark it emits green stuff scientists called LunarAtion. It’s the same effect you saw in the sewers.’

As she moved the telescope around the central area of the Demi-Monde, she saw several huge pictures drawn on the ground around Mare Incognitum. From what she could make out there was a spider, a snake, a shark and what looked like a man, and each of them was a good two or three miles in length and, just like the pyramid, they glowed under the moonlight. ‘Wow! Those pictures are like the Nazca geoglyphs.’

‘Oh, you mean the Speke Etchings. Yeah, we didn’t even know they existed until a year ago. As they’re invisible from ground level they were undiscovered until Speke went up in his balloon.’

‘Who made them?’ She had to ask because according to PINC they didn’t exist.

‘No one knows.’

‘They’re amazing. I’d really love to see them up close.’

There was a ripping sound from above Ella’s head. She looked up to see that part of the balloon’s canvas had torn away.

‘It looks, Ella, as though you’re going to get your wish.’

That the Baron and his men got as far as they did without any trouble was down to the Poles: the Baron had never realised just how much cheek, how much chutzpah Poles had. They were the ones who shouted the ribald replies to the SS guards when they were challenged and the ones who laughed and joked as they marched along, deluding the SS into believing they were just reinforcements on their way to the front. By dint of the Poles’ impertinence and by not firing at anyone the Baron’s regiment made it safely through the Ghetto, out through Southgate, along Odessa’s Deribasovskaya Street, and across the new railway track. And that’s when things had gone wrong. Obviously the ForthRight military had been shaken by Cassidy’s train attack and their reaction had been to dramatically increase the number of soldiers guarding the railway line.

Unfortunately the sentry whom Cassidy tripped over was young, overeager and one of the few men in his company who wasn’t drunk. The boy had been cowering away from the blizzard in the lee of a water tower when Cassidy, frozen and not in a very accommodating mood, fell over him. The conversation that ensued was brief and noisy.

‘Who goes there?’ said the boy through chattering teeth.

‘Someone who’s not as stupid as you are, that’s for sure,’ snarled Cassidy as he hauled himself out of the snowdrift he’d been tumbled into. ‘Spirits damn it, boy, what are you doing hiding away like that?’

The boy, with a terrified look on his face, did his best to face Cassidy down. ‘I-I-I s-s-said who goes there?’

‘Why-why-why,’ Cassidy mimicked a little unkindly, ‘should I tell a f-f-fucking idiot like you anything?’

‘Be-be-because I’m guarding this water tower.’

‘Well, P-P-Private, I’m Sergeant B-B-Bob Cassidy of the First Anglo Rangers and me and my f-f-friends have been ordered to get our a-a-asses over to Hub Bridge Number Two to help with the attack there.’

Cassidy was betrayed by the want of a button. If his ragged greatcoat still had had some of its buttons it wouldn’t have flapped open in the wind to display his blue jacket, the one he had worn when he had been fighting on the Royalist side during the Troubles. The boy saw the jacket, his eyes boggled and then he made what would prove to be a fatal mistake.

‘Royalists!’ he screamed. ‘We’re under attack by Royalists!’ And then to compound his mistake, he fired his rifle. By the time Cassidy had smashed his rifle butt into the boy’s head the damage had been done. The alert rippled around the ForthRight troops stationed along the railway line.

‘Royalists to me,’ screamed the Baron. ‘Captain Crockett, we’re to advance at the double, due south.’

The look he got from Crockett was very articulate. He knew as well as the Baron what lay to the south.

‘That’s the direction where there are the fewest enemy,’ the Baron shouted by way of explanation. ‘We’ll get to the Wheel River and then …’

It was lucky for the Baron that the shooting began when it did, otherwise he would have been forced to explain to Crockett just what he did plan to do. And if he had explained he doubted that Crockett or indeed any of his regiment would have followed him. But by his estimation a probable death was preferable to a certain one and, after all, someone, sometime had to survive Terror Incognita. He just hoped it would be him.

Fortunately for the balloonists, the blizzard eased and the wind shifted back, driving them to the east and blowing them – unnoticed in the snow-filled darkness – a hundred feet over the campfires that marked the SS cordon around ExterSteine. When the wounded balloon finally expired, they came to rest, by Vanka’s estimation, about a half-mile to the west of ExterSteine. The landing was what Ella described as a ‘soft crash’: the basket hit the ground with a considerable bump but as the ground was covered with a thick layer of snow the impact was cushioned. The three of them emerged from the tangle of ropes and wreckage and pronounced themselves grateful that none had any broken limbs. Barely pausing for breath, they set off towards the five stone columns that made up ExterSteine and which could be seen glinting ahead of them in the dawn’s half-light.

Dawn.

As Ella looked to the east, she could see the unmistakable smudge of red light on the horizon signalling that dawn was imminent.

‘How long before sunup, Vanka?’ she whispered – sound travelled easily in the Hub – as she slid and slipped over the pristine snow of the Hubland.

‘Half an hour at the most.’

‘Not enough time.’

‘Maybe not to rescue Norma but maybe enough to stop the Rite of Transference.’

‘How do you figure that?’

‘I remember an article in The Stormer that described the rites Crowley performed to welcome the beginning of Spring. It said something about there being a window cut in the roof of the cavern set at the top of the tallest ExterSteine column and that it was through this window that the first light of the first day of Spring was directed. According to Crowley, this first light of Spring had great occult significance. Maybe if we can block the window we can stop the rite.’

They ran as hard as they could through the swirling snow and the faltering darkness, guided by the shimmering Mantle-ite columns, and as they came closer the other-worldliness of the structure became more apparent. ExterSteine was made up of five gigantic columns that stabbed like rigid fingers out from the middle of the flat, snow-dressed grassland that was the Hub, the Mantle-ite columns luminous in the darkness. Ella guessed the tallest column of the five – Lilith’s Column – stood over two hundred foot tall and was about a hundred foot in girth. Lights flickered at the summit.

A strange, eerie feeling washed over her.

She’d been here before. ‘

That’s where the Rite of Transference must be taking place,’ she called out. ‘That must be where Crowley conducts his rituals.’

Vanka pointed to a staircase that wound around the column. ‘And that’s the way up.’

Ella could only think that the rite being performed by Crowley was so secret that he wanted as few people to witness it as possible and that was why there were no SS StormTroopers guarding the staircase. Indeed, all the Hubland stretching out around ExterSteine seemed deserted, the snow untarnished by footprints or steamer tracks.

Climbing the column was tough: the stairs were steep, the steps slippery with ice and snow, and the savage wind buffeted them every step of the way, but there was no time to pause for breath. As she climbed she couldn’t resist the temptation to drift her fingers over the runic inscriptions etched over the surface of the Mantle-ite column. And though the runes were written in the untranslatable Pre-Folk A and though even PINC couldn’t provide her with an interpretation of what the inscriptions said, she knew what was written there… knew that once she had spoken this strange language.