Chapter Thirty-Seven #2
The archmage poured whisky into two glasses, turned and handed one to Hardy.
“I can perhaps guess. Here. Have a calmative. Chivas Regal, twenty-five years aged. It’s really very good.
Your health, sir.” Raising his glass, sipping delicately.
“We’re talking, presumably, about the illustrious Duncan Silver.
Or, as I’m beginning to believe we should call him, Duncan Slaven of Stac Dubh. ”
Hardy glared at him over the rim of his glass. Tossed back the contents.
“I don’t care what his fucking name is. Silver murdered four policemen last night. Men with families. One of them was a Special Branch detective inspector.”
“Impressive.” Bainbridge sipped at his drink again. “You must have really upset him. I’m not entirely sure, though, why you think this has anything to do with me.”
“You’re talking to him, aren’t you? He stormed the holding station where we had his Irish chippie and his friend from Macclesfield.”
“Yes, that makes sense. I can very easily see the man doing something like that. However, I don’t know where this holding station of yours is.”
“You could have found out. You could have”—Hardy gestured angrily—“divined it, I imagine.”
“Perhaps I could. I’m not sure. But the fact remains, I didn’t. And I certainly wouldn’t have told Mr. Silver, if I had.”
“So you say.”
Bainbridge sighed weightily. “Colonel, I am attempting to keep Duncan Silver onside, because what I have divined is that he likely has a major role to play in this dawning new age of ours. There is an aura around Silver, a frisson of potential, the likes of which I have rarely seen. That doesn’t mean I would assist him in committing mayhem of this sort, or indeed thwarting any of your wider plans.
You did have a plan, I take it, for these people you imprisoned? ”
Hardy opened his mouth. Closed it again.
“We were responding to circumstances,” he said more calmly. “It was a fast-developing situation, and I’ll be the first to admit it got messy.”
“Indeed.” Gesturing toward the armchairs and the fire. “Why don’t we both sit down? It’s going to take intelligence to see our way out of this. Intelligence and cool heads. Help yourself to another drink, please. There’s soda or water, as you prefer. Please, Colonel. Sit.”
Crash of undergrowth behind him—compared to the shrill, tinny crystalline sounds in his ear, it was coarse and deafening. Duncan jerked his hand off the glass, whipped around. Saw Arthur, rain-streaked face, crouched with the carbine across his knees, breathing hard.
“Four men.” Jagged between caught breaths. “Driver. Gorilla. Two officer types. Driver stayed. With the car. Other three are inside.”
Duncan nodded. “Hardy and an aide. We’ve seen them. Adding the gorilla means he doesn’t trust Bainbridge at all.”
“Looks like a bloody sergeant major I had. For basic training, at Salisbury plain. Big, untidy bastard, he was, just like this one.” Breath mostly recovered, Arthur goggled in fascination at the blue glowing Kilner jar in Annie’s lap, the dancing cameo images within. “Is that…?”
“Yes, it is,” said the witch shortly. “Now be quiet, please.”
She grabbed Duncan’s wrist, pressed his hand back to the glass.
“…called you here to meet her.” Bainbridge was at the door of the room, leaning out into the corridor. “Compton—would you be so good as to go up and ask Miss Freeman to join us now? Thank you. And Compton—treat her kindly, please. She’s been through a lot.”
He made his way back to the fire.
“Poor girl, she’s still not fully recovered from her ordeal, even now. What it must have taken to escape from her Huldu masters, with the Forests the way they are now, and when she could remember nothing of her life before them.”
“You’re quite sure she’s genuine?” Hardy’s skepticism was clear even across the tinny crystalline version of hearing it was strained through.
“Oh yes, Colonel. There are ways to tell.”
“But you haven’t matched her with records of the family she was abducted from?”
“No. Freeman is her own choice of surname. We estimate she’s about thirty years of age, and she was traded as a thrall from one region of the British Isles to another at least twice that she can remember.
It would be almost impossible to pin down her point of origin.
We have explained this to her. She is…starting afresh with the Sword and Orb, you might say. ”
A muted knock at the door and a pale, dark-haired woman was ushered into the room, dressed plainly in white blouse and dark skirt. Both men rose reflexively to greet her. Bainbridge grew effusive.
“Ah, Rachel. Thank you so much for joining us. Come and sit by the fire, please. This is Colonel Hardy. He’d be very interested to hear what you told me about the Huldu nurseries.”
The woman called Rachel moved hesitantly to the armchair Bainbridge had been using.
She perched on the edge of the seat, as if poised to flee at a moment’s notice.
She tugged a hank of her long black hair continuously through the fingers of one hand after the other, as if endlessly searching the tresses for nits.
“They are not like us,” she husked, so low that Duncan could barely make out the words.
“In what way, Rachel?” Bainbridge, prompting from behind the chair like a doting father helping his infant daughter with a learned recital. “How are they different?”
“They leave them.”
Something so stark and desolate in the way she said it that Duncan felt a chill blow through him. Felt Nimble Shanks Annie looking at him, met her gaze. She frowned a question. He shrugged. Shook his head.
Rachel started up again, like a freshly wound clockwork toy.
“I saw it, in the glade by the old father oak. Where the tree thief church is standing still, with the cross god looking on over the door. The mothers come to give them suck, but not often. And they leave them again, even when they weep, they leave the babe with the…they call it eilsinni.”
Now Duncan frowned. He knew the word in Skogurtal, had heard it enough times for it to fix in his mind, but now, reaching for meaning, he found nothing, just a vague sense of dread…
“Companion?” mouthed the witch, shooting for translation. He nodded doubtfully.
“Rachel has made drawings for us,” said Bainbridge, now at the table, shuffling papers. “And these correspond to other little-known accounts out of legend, tales told by other supposed returnees from the Fae realm over the centuries, though these have been only whispers and closely guarded arcana.”
For one moment, he looked up and out of the window, across the rain-drenched lawn and into the trees and bushes beyond.
Duncan felt a weird, disorienting wrench—the tiny figure in the water image staring away, the man himself simultaneously right there large as life, a couple of dozen yards away and seemingly staring right at him.
“Bloody Section J, I suppose,” Hardy said. “From their archives?”
“I do not yet have access to Section J’s archives,” Bainbridge said absently, shuffling the papers together. “Though I have begun negotiations in Whitehall that I hope will bear that fruit, among others. No, these accounts are from other sources.”
He came back to the fireplace and took station again behind Rachel’s seat. Held up some of the papers for Hardy to see. The scale of the tangled water image was too small for detail.
“As you can see, Colonel, eilsinni appear to mutate as they grow, much like the Huldu child itself. But I think what we’re dealing with here at base is simply a highly evolved kind of placenta.”
A deep shudder ran through Duncan, enough that he almost let go the Kilner jar. He knew the witch was staring at him, frowning. Bainbridge’s voice wavered and almost went out, came back as Duncan pressed the glass again.
“…begins as not much more than a living cushion for the newborn, a warm bed. There are these nubs, which I think must serve as nipple substitutes, rather like a modern pacifier. Perhaps they even supply some form of nutritive. But in any case, as you can see from Rachel’s drawings here, these nubs begin to elongate, become more like tentacles.
And they are, apparently, mobile, prehensile even. ”
“They turn the babes,” Rachel mumbled. “Like snakes, they turn them. Prodding, touching, turning over.”
“Are you really quite certain about this?” Hardy, appalled, almost outraged by what he was hearing. “Can we honestly take this—this fantastical narrative seriously?”
Rachel’s voice rose. “I’m not a liar! I have seen them!”
“And we believe you, Rachel, of course we do.” Bainbridge put a soothing hand on the young woman’s shoulder.
“Might I remind you, Colonel, that right here in our own country less than six years ago, entire forests erupted from the bowels of the Earth in the space of a single night. England transformed by forces beyond our understanding in a matter of hours. You yourself admit you have seen soldiers struck down with elf shot, a Huldu prowling the trenches of our army after its victim. Do you really now balk at this?”
Hardy cleared his throat. “It seems…fantastical.”
“Yes, so you have said. But I ask you—frame this in another way. Do you think that, if asked to, we could not imagine a future in which the human race will build machines to take away the daily drudgery of child rearing in just this way? If our very own Mr. Wells were to write it in one of his futurist romances, would we not entertain it as entirely possible?”
“That’s not the same! You’re talking of machines, devices. Not…living things.”
“The Huldu do not appear to have any use for machines. They are shape-shifters, bodily self-sufficient. Where else, then, would they go for such technology, if not into their own bodies, the wombs of their own women, where life itself is made, to find the necessary resource?”
Hardy made a noise. Unclear what it was meant to convey.
It didn’t matter; Duncan was lost, locked into flash recall of a darkened forest glade, faint mewlings, soft movement, and something equally soft and sticky he’s just stepped on with his bare foot.
He looks down—not far, he can’t be more than three years old—and sees something that makes no sense…
Jellyfish, Duncan realized, as the memory unlocked. It looked like a huge pale jellyfish, like the ones that used to wash up on the beach at Cadogan’s, but far bigger—
And a baby lying asleep upon it, sharp Fae features glistening and dreaming…
His own scream, high and shrill—
And from the jellyfish, somewhere near the baby’s head, a slim tentacle uncoils, rises like a cobra to the sound of a snake charmer’s pipe, and turns, questing, in his direction…
Cool, Fae hands, grabbing him from behind.
They bear him up, away from the glade and what it holds.
A sibilant voice, snarling in his ear, until he is set down again, slapped repeatedly back and forth across the head and face and arms, until his whole body is trembling and his face is stinging sore and ribboned wet with tears, and he’s told never, ever, ever, to walk there again…
Duncan surfaced, panting harder than Arthur had when he arrived. The witch and the burned man, both staring at him in the rainy dark. He swallowed, hard, pressed again at the Kilner jar’s smooth glass side.
“…as they become mobile, so the eilsinni learns motion, too. Look, as you see here, it’s more amoeboid than anything at this stage.
But with more time—see, limbs, arms and legs, and finally, a near-perfect copy of the emerging child, a caring twin endowed with preternatural intelligence and instincts to protect.
Can you imagine? The first coherent memories that a Fae child will make are of its own face looking back at it! ”
The fervor in Bainbridge’s voice was almost religious. Hardy, clearly uncomfortable, cleared his throat again.
“Are you saying…that this is where the changelings come from?”
“I think it very likely, yes. Not the same eilsinni as are used to raise their own offspring, of course, but I dare say that Huldu females would be able call forth similar placental growth, more or less at will—perhaps over a period of days or weeks, as the plan to snatch a human child is laid? Once delivered, what we call magic would be used to mold the creature to resemble the child it will replace. It makes perfect sense, does it not?”
A long, quiet pause.
Hardy picked up his drink, set it down without tasting it. He put the same hand to his brow. Made an obvious effort. “Miss Freeman. A question, if I may. What happens to these…eilsinni, once the child is grown?”
“They fade.” Even allowing for the crystalline rinse, Rachel’s voice was one of the most brittle, empty sounds Duncan had ever heard. “They corrupt, they stumble, they die. I have watched them. All go back to the Gray.”
“Their purpose is, after all, served.” Bainbridge, explanatory, almost lecturing.
“We know that if a changeling is discovered and taken from its adoptive family, it sickens and dies fairly fast. From the eyewitness accounts I have read, it’s a very similar process to what Rachel here is describing for us.
Without purpose, the eilsinni simply…runs down, like one of the Wellsian machines we were just discussing.
From what Rachel says, it seems to occur once the Fae child reaches one or two years of age.
But Colonel, I feel that we are digressing well away from the main point here. ”
“Which is?”
“Which is that Rachel here can pinpoint, with some degree of accuracy, where these nurseries lie. You heard her description—a great oak, a church long abandoned, with the Christ figure over the door. She has been a very special type of thrall for the Fae, rewarded, I can only assume, for long and faithful service. For many years, in at least two different parts of the country, she has acted as a kind of watchman”—a rich, avuncular chuckle—“well, watchwoman, I suppose we’d have to say, at least if we want to keep Mrs. Pankhurst happy.
A watchwoman, then, for the Huldu’s offspring and their nurturing.
And there is more. There is reason to suppose that these are ancestral sites, knowing what we do of the Fae’s deep conservatism, and it seems to me that with modern mapping techniques, they would be relatively simple to locate. Would you not agree?”
“I suppose so, yes.” Hardy, grudging.
“Yes. And, Colonel, if we know where the Huldu’s offspring are nurtured and raised—well, then, is it not reasonable to assume, using artillery charged with all manner of iron shrapnel, that we can stand off at a comfortable distance outside the Forest and annihilate them with long-range bombardment? ”