The Sunken City Trilogy Page 32

  It made him smile. There were precious few soldiers in the Ministry’s ranks; they would need him when the Fae came. They needed him a lot more than he needed them. He concluded one document with every intention of being provocative, not caring how close to the truth he was:

  The weapon that has fallen into our hands is what they are willing to cross the line and kill humans for. It cannot be questioned that it has the potential to harm the praelucente and change our world. It is the opinion of this agent that this is the first real evidence of the bigger plans of the Fae population. Their interests in the Sunken City are not, as MEE canon dictates, historical – these interests are current and dangerous.

  Casaria left the office shortly after midnight, satisfied that some clerk would be suitably frightened into encouraging a superior officer to do something. He walked the short distance home, enjoying the night air and imagining the future. He would see the Fae and the Ministry clash, he would see blood in the tunnels of the Sunken City and he would be given permission to lead a force against the Fae Transitional City. His own initiative.

  And he would see Pax Kuranes again.

  They would argue and fight, and she would insult him and he would laugh, and they would be forced to join forces and he would channel her passion towards his own agenda. Maybe they would sleep together, he hadn’t decided on that, yet. The more he saw of her the more tempted he became, despite himself. Maybe, he decided, she was more an 8 than a 7.

  Beaming at his imagined future, Casaria approached his apartment block and stopped across the street. His smile disappeared as he felt, all in an instant, the trepidation and urge to run that he must have so frequently bestowed on others. He let it pass, forcing his smile back onto his face and walking towards the entrance.

  The two large men he had fought in the afternoon were waiting with metal bats in their hands. There was no shame in their stance, even though they were loitering by the door of a wealthy apartment block in one of central Ordshaw’s most prestigious neighbourhoods. Between them stood a shorter man, more discreet but menacing in a different way. He was round at his waist and cut a contrast to his goons in their labouring overalls, with his brown woollen suit – something he had clearly chosen with an eye to personal preference, rather than style. As Casaria approached, the man stepped forward.

  “Mr Casaria.” He had a rough west Ordshaw accent, the sort that intimidated people from out of town. “My name’s Stacy Monroe. I believe you had a disagreement with my men today.”

  “I thought we’d settled that,” Casaria replied.

  “No. We’re about to.”

  Casaria scanned all three men, particularly focusing on the bats. They were making a statement, bringing bats instead of guns. And he had already established that at least one of them was no pushover. Tired and injured as he was, it was unlikely he could take on all three of them. He kept smiling, though, thinking it was still worth a try.

  27

  Pax got out of the car for some air, finally clear of the centre of town and, apparently, not being followed. Letty flew out to settle on the car roof next to her. Pax rested an arm on the car, with barely the energy to keep standing.

  “You got a new wing,” Pax observed tiredly, mustering the strength to smile.

  “Of sorts. You got all beat up.”

  “Kind of,” Pax said, nodding.

  “Reeling with regrets?”

  Pax looked into the car, at Grace hunched exhausted across her defeated father’s slowly breathing chest. She scanned over to Holly, who was stretching her legs, staring out at the city skyline. On this hillside road, the view was spectacular, all the skyscrapers and low houses coming together in a chain of yellow windows reflected in the calm river. Pax said, “Nah. You?”

  Letty followed her gaze to the skyline. She took a breath. “Not especially.”

  “I hoped you’d come back,” Pax told her.

  “Yeah? I hoped you’d get yourself killed.” Pax reached out to poke her, her finger all but knocking the fairy down, and Letty batted back at her. “Oi. I’ll tear it off.”

  Holly turned back to them, no humour in her face. She had developed lines of exhaustion over the space of the past few hours. She gave Letty an odd look, still unsure quite how to reconcile the existence of such a small person. Rather than dwell on it, she turned to Pax. “Where do we go? I have a sister in Manchester.”

  “I’m not sure that’s safe,” Pax said. “I wish you hadn’t become involved yourselves.”

  Holly nodded. “All this...it’s unnatural. Not for normal people.”

  “I’ve got some people that we might contact. They’re not normal.” Pax pictured Bees’ warehouse. He might still be there at this hour. Even if he wasn’t, they could hide inside, it wouldn’t be difficult to find a way in. Though given that Casaria had turned up with the device instead of them, and her phone was fried so she couldn’t call ahead, that avenue looked hazy.

  “My husband has a friend, near Long Culdon I believe,” Holly said. “The inventor. She knows what we’re dealing with, at least. And she’s kept herself hidden from it, all these years, somehow. I think she could help him, if we can’t go to a hospital.”

  Pax considered it, thinking out loud. “Mad scientist versus possible gangsters. Some choice.”

  “That settles it, then,” Holly said firmly. “You didn’t mention your friends were criminals.”

  “Ah.” Pax lifted a finger, about to protest, but realised there was no point. “Okay.” Holly nodded and went to get back in the car. Pax said, “Mrs Barton. You did well.”

  Holly gave her a short nod. “Thank you for keeping my daughter safe.”

  She sat back down in the car and turned to her family, whispering assurances to them.

  Letty lolled onto her elbows and let out a big sigh. She said, “So you great lummox, what now? Now that there ain’t no one wants to resolve this thing but us.”

  “Whatever that thing is down there,” Pax said, “it’s doing more damage than I think even your people realise. Or care about. And it’s more complicated than you realise. It was feeding the thing that I think was giving Apothel orders.”

  “His Blue Angel?”

  “Yeah. Its screens can do way more than communicate messages. Whoever or whatever’s behind them, I think it’s their monster. Why did they make Apothel jump through those hoops? Why did they encourage him to get your device if it could harm this thing that they’re somehow connected to?”

  “To remove it from the equation?” Letty replied. “Apothel died, remember.”

  Pax frowned. She drummed her fingers on the car. “Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t what he thought it was. Right?”

  “Yeah.” Letty yawned. “I need a fucking drink. So do you.”

  Pax nodded. She imagined going back to the Sticky Tap, and putting a full stop in the craziest weekend of her life. Have a drink, pat herself on the back. They’d all got away more or less safely, at least. But that only reminded her of Rufaizu. He must’ve known what Apothel went through, having come back from wherever he’d been. And she hadn’t done a thing for him, even as she’d risked everything to save this family. Hadn’t done a thing for him yet, she told herself. She said, “We can figure this out, Letty. We want the same thing, don’t we?”

  Letty stared at her, like she was studying her anew. The fairy said, “Close enough.”

  “That’ll do,” Pax said. She laid her hand down for Letty to hop on, and the fairy regarded it oddly. She didn’t need the help any more. But she shrugged and stepped up anyway. As Pax lifted Letty and moved to get back in the car, she said, “We’ve still got a few days until the WPT. Think we can save the city by then?”

  Enjoyed reading?

  The saga continues in just a few pages with Blue Angel – but before delving back in, please consider reviewing Under Ordshaw online (even if it’s short – to be concise is a virtue, after all). As an independent author, I rely on fans like you to spread the word of these books –
and the best way to do that is by leaving a few words and a star rating on Amazon here or Goodreads here.

  Under Ordshaw

  Copyright © 2018 by Phil Williams

  The moral right of Phil Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. If such tunnels exist beneath your city, tread with the utmost caution.

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by P. Williams

  Published by Rumian Publishing

  Blue Angel

  Part 1

  Monday

  1

  Electric soldiers marched across her vision.

  Between them and an abyss of black stood legions of unnatural things. Alive but unmoving, familiar but obscure. A blur of animal parts and humanoid shapes, sharp and soft, solid and fluid, all writhing together. Things that should not be, amassed in the darkness. Each was individual, but all combined into one whole.

  The electric soldiers formed a cordon. Managing, monitoring, watching, silently. Their limbs spread out and drew the world in. Their lightning flashes snapped against the features of Ordshaw. A wall of tall bricks, lit blue. A concrete pillar, before a body of still water. A weather-worn bridge, arching like a wave. The grimacing face of a statue – a fountain. Black metal stairs, a scaffold of steps. A small hall, cracked as though lashed by a tremendous whip. A high point, atop a tower looking down on the sleeping city. Each thunderous, flashbulb moment, connected somehow to a central crackling ball of light.

  They were drawing together.

  Her heart burnt and pressed against her ribs, drawn there too. With each beat, the creatures were lit in fearsome poses, baring teeth, watching her, hating her. The electric soldiers watched too. Monitoring. Monitor. Minotaur.

  The jaws of the beast ripped through it all.

  Pax Kuranes jolted awake. She put a hand to her chest, taking gasping breaths as the feeling faded. Some old machine rumbled in mechanical stops and starts on the other side of the room. She frowned. Had that woken her? Created images in her dreams?

  There were no monsters, nothing to be scared of.

  She rubbed her eyes and took in the dusty floor she was sitting on. Dirty plastic trays teetered over her, atop a table and bench, and the scent of a harsh chemical made her nose crinkle. She recalled where she was. An old telegraph station in Long Culdon, the home and workplace of Darren Barton’s doctor friend. A doctor who ran experiments on unusual plants and creatures. Possibly monsters.

  There were monsters. Lots of them.

  Pax leaned against the wall. Her back ached, but her outstretched legs felt fine. She flexed her feet, trying to remember why that mattered. There was a rip in her jeans, stained dark from blood. She touched a finger to a tiny but deep scratch. It had scabbed over, and it hurt like a dull bruise. She’d taken a bullet there, from a fairy gun. A fairy bullet.

  What else?

  She ran a hand through her hair, pulling it out in front of her face. Frizzy, smelling like she’d rolled in burnt animal fat. The edges of her jeans and her hoodie were marred with scorch marks and concentrated filth. She picked up one of her boots. The treads had warped as though left on a hot plate. For six years, these unbranded boots had been a comfortable constant. One thing in her life unaffected by the march of time or the turns of a deck of cards. Victim, at last, to an intangible electric beast.

  The minotaur. An underground monster, formed of light, that looked nothing like its namesake; a ball of electric limbs that had pinned her to the ground and tried to suck the life out of her. All because she’d tried to save Barton’s teenage daughter, Grace, while Barton himself, actually eager to fight the monsters, had succumbed to terrible injuries elsewhere in the secret labyrinth that was the Sunken City.

  It had been an interesting night, hadn’t it?

  Pax took out her phone to check the time, but that was warped too, screen cracked and unresponsive. Her coat was balled up on the floor. That, at least, looked unharmed. Pax bent over it and whispered, “You in there?” No response. “Letty?”

  “Screw off,” a little voice replied from somewhere in the folds.

  “Hang on,” Pax said, scooping the coat up. The voice started to complain, but Pax warned, “I’m taking you outside – you’re the one that wanted to stay hidden, remember?”

  The voice went quiet.

  Pax scanned the rest of the room as she stood. It was filled with laboratory equipment and overgrown plants. There was a corner sectioned off by frosted glass that formed a makeshift testing chamber, where the machinery sounds were coming from. The doctor’s vaguely scientific tests suggested she was some kind of botanical scavenger, collecting weeds, perhaps living off worms. The sort of person you could make a documentary about, if anyone realised she existed. Pax had barely spoken to her, in the drama of their arrival; the doctor had avoided eye contact and flitted off to her experiments as soon as she was sure Darren Barton wasn’t going to die.

  He, presumably, was in the bedroom with his family, where Pax had left them.

  Pax stepped into her boots and tested the uneasy balance of their soles, then navigated a corridor of roots to get outside. The building’s surroundings mimicked the wildness of the interior, with trees reaching towards the porch and invading the lumpy track that led away. Pax spotted a sliver of light through the thicket, morning threatening to break through.

  Her coat emitted a muffled snarl.

  “Wait,” Pax warned. Letty burst out of the coat pocket and circled in the air. The two-inch fairy drew level with Pax’s face. She had a single beating wing and a contraption strapped over the opposite shoulder, which whirred and distorted the air like a heat shimmer.

  “You mountainous turd, you wake me up by picking up my fucking bed?”

  With her miniature t-shirt and shorts, colourful hair and holstered pistol, it remained a marvel that a creature so delicate was so vulgar.

  Pax swung the coat on. “Let’s get clear of this place so we can talk.”

  “Talk, hell,” Letty said, but she was already away, gliding through the trees. Pax followed. Thick as the trees were, they soon ended, abruptly, at the edge of an empty expanse of grass. The sky was a blanket of steely white beyond, muting a curved landscape of peaks and valleys.

  “The Drumdon Hills,” Pax said. “I never realised they were so close.”

  “Big whoop,” Letty said, landing on her shoulder. “A whole lot of nothing.”

  “You have to stand there? Want to give me a crick in my neck?”

  “Yeah,” Letty said. “Maybe it’ll break.”

  “Not a morning person, are you?”

  Letty snorted. “Thought we had that in common.”

  The fairy had a point. The sun’s glare sat low in the clouds. This was three days in a row that Pax had risen before lunchtime. A personal record. She said, “Something woke me. Didn’t feel right.”

  “Baby had a bad dream?” Letty responded harshly.

  “You blame me?”

  The fairy paused, finally taking stock. Her voice softened. “Where’s it hurt?”

  “It doesn’t, actually. Which isn’t right, is it? I got shot. And that thing got me. It felt like I was being skewered by light. Or raped by a river.”

  “That old feeling.”

  Yet there was no pain now. Only the echo of that other feeling. The burning in Pax’s chest, and the sense that she was being pulled towards something.

  “You touched it,” Letty said, following her thoughts. “Who knows what kind of effects that’ll have on you. I wouldn’t let her know, though.” She indicated the doctor with a nod in the direction of t
he telegraph station. Surrounded by trees, it was the sort of place where a prowler would invite gullible college students and play disco music while he sawed them up. “You’d wake up in a white room full of tubes.”

  Pax agreed. The unreal creatures in the city’s hidden labyrinth had powers she didn’t understand, beyond the knowledge that one of them was sucking energy from oblivious Underground commuters and the buildings above. Reaching that understanding had driven her into financial ruin and potential homelessness. Revealing to a scientist that she’d touched an intangible creature and might be suffering side effects wasn’t going to make her life easier. She rocked on her heels. “My boots are screwed.”

  “Good luck shopping,” Letty said. “The Ministry will have eyes on every camera in the city. If this hill-dyke doctor doesn’t turn you in first.”

  “We lasted the night.”

  “And now it’s time to leave town and join a travelling rodeo.”

  Pax considered the hills ahead. In their folds, she could see a small hamlet. The government wouldn’t have surveillance in places like that. She could start a new life. All she needed was locals with spare cash and an affinity for gambling. She could conceal herself in a blanket of countryside or hide in the crowds of another city. But it’d taken years to build her life in Ordshaw, and that had only just started taking shape. “How do I go back to how things were a few days ago?”

  Letty laughed. “Unsee everything you saw? Hope the Ministry forget you exist?”

  Pax hummed. No. The Ministry of Environmental Energy weren’t going to leave her alone. And if they didn’t hunt her, then the fairies – the Layer Fae – would, for the things she’d seen. Those miniature maniacs were as keen on protecting the status quo as the MEE. “So. We’ve got my government protecting a monster because they think its weird aura benefits people. Your government think it’s all better left alone. Neither of them are aware that this thing isn’t just a parasite, it’s connected to something else. Someone needs to open all their eyes.”