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[Jim]

Just Another Kill

A Fan Fiction

By Jacques I. M. Stewart
This is a not for profit enterprise and is nothing more than a simple entertainment by way of fan fiction. All non-original characters and situations are copyright Ian Fleming Publications Limited and there is no intention asserted to the contrary. All original characters and situations are copyright the author.

11. Killing In The Name

What the hell is that bloody noise?
Someone pulling at…? Picking. No, plucking. Wet plucking.
Can’t be that damned harp.
Sounds...
Pulling something heavy out of mud.


Fajeur licked the needle gleefully, ostentatiously, theatrically, drawing back and forth, the steaming dog’s tongue baconrinded thick with gobbets of foaming loose saliva. Drying the syringe along the length of his stained sash, he looked down at Bond and smiled a rabid sneer. “It is time to relax now. Time to sleep, hien?”

Bond did not answer, instead remaining both fascinated and appalled by the way his skin shook, trying to tear itself away and flee in gleeful liberty, leaving him on the slab, raw and ready to be devoured. It cannot have been the reaction to the beating: rough stuff, admittedly, but he had known worse.

“It will be a gentle start, M’sieu. So gentle. But there will be… escalation.” He pronounced it to rhyme with ‘fashion’. “This is the best way. Do you remember what happens when a toad cooks?”

Snorting sharply, dismissively, Bond let half a minute pass. The trembling skin continued its struggle. Couldn’t be fear. Can’t let it be. “No. Sorry. Trying to give them up.”

Fajeur ignored the jibe. “Thrown into boiling water, he dies,” he clicked his left finger and thumb, “so. Or jumps out. He reacts. If I give you a full dose, your heart, it bursts. Or perhaps your mind. All over, so quickly. But start him gently, cool water, turn the heat up slowly, and he does not realise the danger. He is comfortable, a happy toad, is he not? He welcomes what I do, and does not try to escape.” A murderous clown’s smile, joyful and vicious. “So it will be with you. Soon you will beg me for your next dose, as you should have begged for those pills.”

Despite his numb, bleeding lips, despite the increasing suspicion that the intermittent plucking surrounding him was the sound of his skin crawling, Bond smiled, fleetingly. “Still hurts, does it? So it should. Revenge. Feel good?”

Fajeur shrugged. “Not at all. I do not care.”

Bond believed him. Crueller for the indifference. He had noted that Fajeur had barely blinked when setting about his body with the broken cue, and suspected that the man’s pulse had only periodically slipped into a higher gear. A leisurely going through of well-practised motions.

The assault having been halted by a casual wave of Sycorax’s hook, Bond lay back on the billiard table, spreadeagled arms and legs tied by strong rope to the nearest pockets, unsure whether the blood seeping up through his shirt was his or that of any number of previous occupants. The stench of sweated pork he took to be his predecessors. Or Fajeur. Both, in all probability.

The way they had stretched him had one recognisable advantage: the muscles taut, the attack had felt muted, distant, smothered. Bond knew that the pain was only biding its time, waiting for them to cut him free, for his body to relax and then, mocking such comfort and relief, attack. The Trojan horse principle, one he had used himself at times. Successful times.

Fajeur tossed the cue to his right. Striking the empty stone fireplace, it splintered into three. At least that’s over with, thought Bond. What now?

The policeman turned to Sycorax. The older man, wrapped in his fraying purple sheet, sat cross-legged in a slashed Chesterfield armchair, idly rubbing the hook of bone with his right forefinger and thumb, as if cleaning a coin. Meeting Fajeur’s gaze, he said, calmly, “Proceed. Please.”

Bond glared at Fajeur. “Softening me up for questioning? Old routine. Did we teach you that?”

Fajeur rolled Bond’s right sleeve past the elbow. “I have no questions to ask, M’sieu. You have no answers to give.”

Bond turned to face Sycorax. “Don’t you want to know about Camille Dejouis?”

Sycorax did not respond, choosing instead to contemplate the sparse contents of a fruitbowl to his left. A weighty decision made, he speared a scarlet apple onto his hook. Transferring this to his right hand, he bit into it. To Bond, his own mouth filling with the bitter metallic tang of his blood, the apple looked the sweetest, juiciest one that had ever been grown, its white flesh glistening with refreshment and purity against the gleaming ruby skin. He could feel his saliva building. Swallowing it down in his present position would be hell, but he had to do it, otherwise drown. He expected that Sycorax knew this, an expectation confirmed to Bond’s mind by the way the man chewed deliberately slowly, studying him.

Bond drank his own blood down, and winced at the throat burn. Running his tongue behind his teeth, he explored the greasy slick of residue, working it free, swallowing that too.

Apparently sated, Sycorax took a deep breath. When he spoke, there was a resigned patience in his voice, the weariness of a repeatedly disappointed teacher. “You wish to tell me about her whether I ask you or not. I doubt that I need to hurt you to extract that information. You wish to tell me, wish so fervently to boast your knowledge that it would be a waste of my energies to cause you pain, and a waste of yours to resist it. Accordingly, if I inflict more damage, I choose to do so now without evident benefit to either of us beyond the hurt itself. So, continue.” Unclear whether this was a direction to Fajeur or to Bond, or to both, Sycorax did not clarify, instead taking another bite of the apple. Juice oozing brimfully from his lips, he caught the droplets on his raised bonehand before wiping this on his trouserleg.

Bond snorted in disgust and stared up at the ceiling from which the blistered wallpaper stalactites dropped listlessly. He hated injections, even when he knew what it was; no point in giving Fajeur the satisfaction of seeing his reaction as he felt the needle roughly, inexpertly, pushed into his vein. Upon withdrawing the syringe, the policeman spat onto Bond’s shivering skin to lubricate the wound. Bond thought that he felt the lukewarm spittle beginning to course within him, but accepted that this was whatever they had put into his body starting to run his blood through.

A quietness bloomed, the silence punctured only when Sycorax crunched his apple once more.

“What is it?” Bond asked. “Some sort of truth serum?” He hoped that the contempt was sufficiently tangible.

“No.” It was Sycorax who spoke. “I have tired now of your truth. I admit it, Bond; I made a mistake, but not one I expect to regret. Even though you reappeared with the gun, I gave you the last benefit of my doubt that you worked for the charity. Your reaction to Consul Fajeur’s attack proves otherwise; that you are a professional. You maintained your silence. In saying nothing, everything is revealed. Hurting you was necessary to establish this. From now on, I am hurting you not because I need to, but because I can. Perhaps that is the worse for you, for it removes any hope that I will have it stop once I have what I want. I already have that.

“I am surprised that you do not realise what is now within you. It is the same opiate that your predecessors became so dependent upon; such pretty flowers, the lake poppies. It is, in truth, upon the physical body very mild; it will kill pain, it will numb you for a short period but it is of no greater strength than those little pills you have craved and seen fit to tear my people and my country apart to get your filthy hands upon. Give it fifteen minutes to take effect.”

Sycorax stood, and approached the table. He casually threw the dripping apple core onto Bond’s stomach, where it lolled to a halt, provocatively beyond reach.. “I will be the one to tell truths. My Russian friends wanted to exploit these powers. Upon testing, admittedly testing upon my people rather than theirs, the poppy’s true nature demonstrated itself to them. I let it. I wanted to see it. Again. It never fails to interest me. They wanted to see it. They were amused. And, when their amusement faded, they harvested. They are refining the drug, Mr Bond. I believe they call it brainwashing. An unamusing joke; the poppy yields madness. It is filth. It will make you highly suggestible, to me, to Fajeur and anyone talking to you, but moreso to yourself. It unlocks the locked; locked for a reason. That is why there is no need to threaten you. You are your own threat.

“It torments the mind, Bond. You will soon slumber, blind to the true world, and in that slumber this opiate’s hallucinogenic assault will tear your mind to shreds. It is an obscenity of a drug. On your current dose, Mr Bond, it will be short, it will be vivid, and it will be exceptionally unpleasant. You deserve no less. Perhaps the visions will be no more than a minute: that will not kill you, but your mind will begin to accept death as a solution to its suffering. Your mind will turn against you and encourage you on to embrace your destruction. When the mind is poisoned against the body, the body cannot win. That is what happened previously. That is what will happen today.

“Perhaps you are right, Bond. It is a truth drug, but not one that uncages truths you wish to guard from me. No; they will be truths from which you have been protecting yourself.”

Although he believed himself to be moving them, Bond could not feel the tips of the fingers of his left hand. Working on the theory that this may have been more to do with Fajeur cracking the billiard cue across them rather than the speed of the drug, he resolved to keep talking. He had to keep talking. Talking meant consciousness. Forming words, arguing, swearing, still alive, still hope…

“You’ve made a worse mistake, Sycorax. This one you’ll regret. Any…” What’s the word? Can’t think of it…

“Yes?”

“…pity I had at your being hunted… you’ve now removed from me. Any pity staying my hand, doubting you as a target, it’s all gone. Gone. Pray to whichever god you believe in that I don’t get free because when I do, I will hurt you, I will hurt you badly. You’ve made up my mind for me. Thanks.” He looked away. “To hell with you.”

Sycorax smiled, thinly. “There are worse fates a man could suffer. You will soon see this. You present me no risk any more, Mr Bond. All you are now fit for is an entirely satisfactory death.”

“Neither of us will see it, Sycorax. She’s going to kill you today.”

Fajeur laughed, softly. “We will find her.”

Bond lied a pitying look. “No. My experience… is that she finds you. She won’t give you time to realise it.”

Sycorax drew the side of the hook along Bond’s collarbone, a barber running a razor across a strop. “You have spoken to her?”

“Yes.”

“And she is aware of what may happen? She is aware of the Archangel?”

“Yes. The… American certainly was.”

“Ah yes, the American. What was it you called him? Torpenhow?”

“I didn’t call him that. That’s…what he said his name was.”

“Of course. To me, he is Leibner. To neither of us I suspect is he his true name.” Sycorax drew his arm away, folding it tightly with his other across his chest, restraints on a bursting barrel. “If a man can deny himself and lie about his name, he can lie about all things. You, of course, would know this.”

“Tell me what he looks like.”

“Then you would help me? Find him, stop him?”

“Yes.”

The overhanging brow creased into fissures eroded deep with thought. Then, to Bond’s despair, Sycorax stuck his bottom lip out, in childish mockery, insolence. “…He is white.”

“Don’t be a bloody fool.”

“Ah, but that is the problem you people have, my friend. You all look the same. Do not worry, Bond: I shall deal with Mr Leibner. But first, I shall deal with you.”

“Look,” spat Bond. “Listen… to me… to me when I tell you that you’re finished, man. Before you even start. If I’m now out of my own control, fear that. I was your only hope.”

Sycorax shook his head. “You are not a man upon whom I would rely for my safety, Mr Bond.”

Bond sighed softly. “I could have been.” When Sycorax did not respond, Bond turned his head to face the opposite wall. Leaning by the door, a blotchy tailor’s mannequin lolled at a languid angle, dressed in a flame-sleeved frock coat, topped with a judicial, powdered wig. Without a face, it was disgusting, sinister, unknowable. He turned back - he could not feel himself turning back - to the two men, and addressed Fajeur. “Yours?”

The policeman grinned, the teeth jagsharp, glistening. “I am merely the vessel.”

“What?”

“The Count Astaroth. I am a superior spirit, one of the great Infernal Powers within the Grand Conjuration of Spirits, exhorted when one seeks to pact with Lucifer.”

Bond exhaled, dismissively. “Another god complex. You aren’t the first god that I’ve met. You won’t be the first god that… that I’ll kill.” He sniffed and nodded backwards to the mannequin. “You might be the first to dress the part, though. Very creative. Won’t help you.”

Warmness spreads…

“Still, believing this rubbish means you accept the existence of God. Can’t have one without the other.”

“Indeed,” said Sycorax. “It is unwise to deny the presence and power of one’s enemy, Mr Bond.”

“You… seem happy to.”

“Not at all. That you lie before me now is evidence of my respect.”

“I wasn’t talking about me.”

“You believe I fear her?” Incredulity, soft under the booming voice, sank Bond’s sprits. An infantile, wet giggle spat from Fajeur, dismal confirmation. “Not at all. I will her on. She is unfinished work. I have searched for her, it is true, but not searched afraid. Unafraid. Eager. You are promising that she is close. Close enough to touch…?” He trailed off. “Then soon she will lie where you lie. And soon she will die. She is… unfinished.”

“You’re a mad bastard.”

“Call him Praetor,“ growled Fajeur.

“I call him Mister Sycorax.”

A rumble of amusement. “It is of no matter, Consul. Any man who mocks an enemy is unprepared for him. I am a man who is threatened, daily. I could even be killed in my sleep, or when I wash, or when I eat. Mlle Dejouis, if she is vengeful, is but one more threat of many. Do not believe that I stand before you now having taken no precautions to protect myself against her as much as against others, you included. Given where we now are, you should grant me that foresight.”

“Granted.”

“You must understand that the reason I do not choose to threaten you is not due to any genuine admiration; it is futile and exhausting to threaten a captured man, a dying man. You chose to die the moment you returned. My warning was not enough and now I cannot threaten but I can promise. As for the gods, your people gave us your God. You taught us to close our eyes in prayer, and we shut them tight, a country of the blind. When we reopened them… While we had been unsighted, you had taken our land and our riches. An unfair exchange. Is it not surprising that we would reject a god that brings forth such misery?”

“We gave you… civilisation.”

“An alternative, rather than an establishment. There always was a civilisation, simply not one that you could exploit. You did, it is true, give us education. We have an enquiring mind, as a result. The children will always spurn the parent. Accordingly, we evolve new gods.”

“Every boy needs an imaginary friend.”

“Blasphemy is the refuge of a coward, M’sieu,” barked Fajeur. “You must understand this is so.”

“What you need to understand is that all you are is a bloody policeman.”

Fajeur dismissed Bond’s comment with an airy wave. “My inferior spirits lie in Nesbiros and Sagatana.”

Bond affected a smile. “What do they do? Issue parking tickets?”

Fajeur took a step closer and Bond pressed his eyes shut, bracing himself for the strike, the punch, whatever it would be. Nothing came. Or was it worse: nothing felt? Opening his eyes, the lashes springing apart as the drying blood cracked loose, Bond pressed his head back into the table as into view came the man’s mouth, gums bleeding black down the razored teeth, inchdistant from Bond’s face. The breath was hot, acrid, sourmeaty. “I bite, M’sieu. The woman, in the white house, so many years ago, I, the Count Astaroth, I bit her. Do you not see? I bit her gut out of her. Do you not see? M’sieu, tell me you see. Otherwise your eyes have no use and I bite them from your face.”

Bond stared at him. “I see.”

Fajeur pulled away. “Bien. You know it will happen again, do you not? The woman you abandoned in Sengee? She will be bitten. Ah! There! There is life yet - how you struggle so! You are strong against the drug, M’sieu. But soon, it will overwhelm you.”

“Touch her and…”

Sycorax boomed an interruption. “And what, Mr Bond? Futile threats of a finished power. You have no sabre left to rattle.” He pressed the hook into Bond’s stomach. “I stand here the victor. You brought me war, and yet still I win.”

Slipping into a hot bath. Washing over. Slipping. Warm and welcoming and…

Fight it.

“Go on then; make… all this… happen,” Bond hissed. “Do it, bring forth Satan. Long overdue chat.”

“No.” Fajeur walked to the mannequin and lifted the sleeves of the jacket, in thought. “We are not within the Circle of Evocation, and there is not time enough. We are required to perfume it appropriately. Your perfume, your stench of sacrelige, will prevent it. Calling forth Aluiel, Valuerituf, conjuring nisa chienibranbo calevodium in your filthy presence, these would be unsacred, they would be blasphemous. M’sieu, it is not a sideshow. I need you to understand that, understand it before you die.”

“Enough.” Sycorax raised both arms, as if in defence. Bond thought he had heard a tremble in the man’s voice, yet knew that this could have been the effect upon his own mind of the hellish concoction that they had fed him. “Fajeur, ready the vehicle. Mr Bond is about to face demons of his own making. We need not raise any others.”

The policeman bowed and, his upper lip curling malevolently into a silent growl, nodded once at Bond before leaving the room.

Now floating.

Breathe.

“She told me what you did to her.” Bond tried shaking his head. Nothing. No sensation at all. God almighty, what was this muck?

“You saw it?”

Bond swallowed, fighting back a choke of disgust. “Yes.”

“A blood sacrifice.”

“…Christ.”

“Exactly.” Sycorax resumed his seat. “You think that beyond these borders, there could be no such thing? The Massai still practise it, even if it is your Christian god that oversees that corrupted country. The same god that ordered Abraham to slaughter Isaac to change the ways of his people, the god that blood-sacrificed his own son to lead the people on, if one believes it. Ritualistic blood sacrifice is not the work of Satan or demons or darkness. Your people, in your churches and fine cathedrals, taking their communion, drinking like vampires the blood of Jesus Christ…

“For the Massai, blood sacrifice is in their tradition too, devotion to Enkai. The Christian authority cannot stop it. It seeks to rationalise the behaviour as consistent with its own doctrine; remarkably easy. It turns a blind eye. Just the one. Just the one…

“The giving of blood - the involuntary donation - is endemic, Mr Bond, in the freedom of peoples.”

“So in attacking… Mlle Dejouis, you were freeing her?”

“Would you not say that she changed?”

Bond chose not to dignify this with a response. “What Fajeur believes… scares you, doesn’t it?”

“If I believed it as strongly, it would, yes.”

“You don’t, then?”

“It is unwise for any politician to be devout to anything other than his policies. True faith will always conflict with the inevitable requirement for expediency, and thus it has no place in government of peoples. Any prime minister or president elected on faith is elected on exploiting that of others, not theirs.”

“Except… where what it preaches explains a… monstrous policy?”

“Quite. One can always rely on readily exploitable faith to bridge holes in logic; I admit it, and willingly. Fear and faith, much the same things, paper over the cracks most conveniently. The sacrifice is a sound example, and it is not confined to we dark, unknown peoples.” Sycorax wrapped the purple sheet around him. “Your witch-hunters slaughtered unmarried, ageing women whose monthly blood sacrifice had stopped. A political policy, beyond a rational explanation, justifiable on faith. You may say such things happened in the past, but the present only takes one second to become that past, my friend.

“Mr Bond, at the genesis of every epoch, there is blood. Was it not Gaia who bestowed a sickle upon Kronos to castrate his father, and from such bloodletting the Titans sprang?”

“And you would… do it with… a hammer and sickle?”

Skin’s calm. Damned noise stopped.

I’ve lost.

“Hm! And the ideals of a New World were not bettered by the slaughter and enslaving of thousands, millions perhaps, of Americans? Your Empire was a house built on sand eroded by rivers of blood. The Nazis slaughtering the Jews was an inevitable construct of human history. It has always happened. It will happen still. Your government, America’s government, with their scare stories of how the Russians will turn Western minds, the pernicious influence of Communism in what they read or watch or eat or with whom they consort, to justify state action, to justify their militarism, to justify men like you; is it so very different to what Hitler said of the Jew? No.

“I expect the Russians tell equivalent lies to their people. The Chosen people - Hitler’s Master Race or America’s Pilgrims or the Red Army or perhaps it will be the Arabs next - will always claim the right to do it, spurred on by a belief system that does not deny such things, but indeed contains them. Those who are put to the sword, to the gun, to the bomb, are always inferior, fit only for the abattoir. The Inquisition. Hiroshima. Korea. Blood sacrifice cleanses. Your Crusades, killing in the name. A monstrous policy indeed, hard logic would weep for it, but unquestioned, unquestioned on faith. When you took India, when you took this country, no very different. Your time is done. In whose name will the next crusaders strike? In whose name will the next blood sacrifice be given?

“It should not be seen as an instrument of horror; we are horrified by the unknown. This is not the unknown. It is the inevitable mechanism of change. We deny it unwisely, and deny it for we have been told that every single human life is sacred, is priceless. Yet the same texts only serve to remind us how inconsequential we are. See how your God sweeps away cities and peoples; it is all written down, shamelessly. War and conquest have traditionally done the same thing, an extreme realisation not of priceless life, but of valueless life. We sacrifice the weak, those who hold us back, and from it, a better world emerges. This message is consistent to both war and scripture. That is not a coincidence. Either we have invented our gods to excuse the violence we do, or our gods use us as the means to their end.

“It is true that the next war will be fought many miles apart, and one will be able to close one’s eyes to the dripping of the blood, but blood will still drip. One muses, Mr Bond, whether our instinct for bathing in it thus denied by distance, we will seek other outlets for what must happen. Will there come a generation who only know the violence through the newspaper, or upon their television screen, both of which they can ignore, and will therefore require fresh outlets for this suppressed inevitability? Our most extreme blood sacrifices removed from us by the electrical computer and the missile, with what will we replace it? Another form? That is where the horror lies. Not in that sacrifice will happen, but in how. Hm. Human history is not written in ink, my friend. So, all wars are holy for all wars exemplify the sacrifice our gods would have for us in any event, sacrifice expected of us. Beyond times of war, this does not change, but it may be yet more terrible. At all times, though, if we are to survive, nourishing our capacity for violence or our spiritual self-satisfaction, someone weaker must be sacrificed.

“Today, it is you.”

Head heavy, arms gone, legs gone, gone.

Gone.

Sycorax stood, and approached the billiard table. “Do you know how the conquering Caesars treated the vanquished generals? They were granted a particular indignity in death, chained to the back of the victor’s chariot and paraded in disgrace through the streets. Then they were crucified, or fed to the lions, their fate depending on which way the Emperor’s thumb would move. I doubt, Mr Bond, that in your case it will get that far.”

“Agreed. You‘re… running out of thumbs.”

“Hm! A pointless jibe. But, for a dying man, you are brave. I allow you that. We both know that bravery is the compliment one pays to failure.”

Bond spat, feebly. The saliva lingered on his lips a moment, before working its way back through. “Enough of the… pantomime, the dressing-up box. This is no Rome, and you are… no Roman.”

Sycorax shrugged. “Perhaps you prefer the legends of the Greek? How Achilles dragged slain Hector thrice around the walls of Troy? ‘Look how the sun begins to set, how ugly night comes breathing at his heels’. Hm? The parallel is there.”

“He was already dead.”

“As with you.” The voice blandly reassured the fact.

“You… think your people will… turn out for such a spectacle?”

“Yes. Those who do not will be dealt with by Fajeur.”

“They’ll hate you for that.”

“Let them hate me so long as they fear me.”

Losing…

Something from the past…

Unlocking the locked…

“From what… what I remember, Sycorax, it was Caligula who said that. Mad, Caligula, you know? Made his horse a consul. Still, you’ve made a police officer out of a dog… not so very… different…”

Sycorax raised an eyebrow, languidly. “You have read Suetonius?”

“Not out of choice. It’s always the… more violent parts… that schoolboys remember.”

“Quite so; my son would say no different. Hm! I see the surprise in your cursed eyes that your hateful instinct towards mockery should have picked such a subject. Doubtless you would not usually trade insults of such a kind.” Sycorax feigned a questioning tone. “Where, then, can that have come from? What fermented venom seeps through? Interesting where your mind wanders to, while it dies. Your childhood. The handle of a door is being tested, my friend. What is it that has been hidden? Does it hear the lock rattling, or the pounding fist? Does it thrill at the thought of its freedom…?

“To be a child again; how you must envy my son his opportunities. Are you still with me, Bond?” Sycorax slapped him with his human hand. Nothing. Pretend that there was something. “Still, an educated man… At one time. Interesting.” He drew the thin hook of bone down Bond’s left forearm, splitting the skin intermittently, scoring it as one would a duck breast. “It would have been wiser to have been born a fool.” He withdrew the hook. “Mad Caligula. The convenience of the single word description, to avoid understanding the breadth of achievement. Rebuilding Syracuse, the honouring of Tiberius, the humiliation and surrender of Adminius. But, no; with Caligula, all that forgotten: he was mad. Your George III, mad. Hitler, Alexander, Peter the Great, definers of civilisations in their own ways but all mad. I wonder, Mr Bond, what the one word said of me will be?”

“…Forgotten.”

“Ah! So dismissive. Still, perhaps you speak the truth. All I do is lay the ground for he who is to come. No, my friend, not the demon, but my son. He will be a great leader. I am merely a necessity; I am merely the means by which he can avoid having to do the things that burden me. Things like this. So, I should be flattered. If I am ultimately forgotten, then I have achieved my goal. I admit it, though,” and at this Sycorax attempted a smile, “I was expecting you to call me - what? - a savage.”

“Too… great a compliment.”

The smile dropped. “So be it. What else do you remember of Gaius Caligula, beyond the amusing fairy stories?”

“He was killed by people closest to him, his guards. His… police.”

“The fate of many great men. Many Caesars.”

“You would… be… the thirteenth one. Unlucky, Sycorax.”

“If you are advising me to keep a close eye on Consul Fajeur, save your breath for your screams, Mr Bond. Fajeur has faith. Accordingly, he can be kept on a tight leash.” Sycorax sighed, a sigh to a growl. “It is interesting that you warn me that the greatest threat comes from within. You will soon know this of yourself, of course. Do you feel it yet, running through, the fear beginning to smother you?”

“No.”

“Ah. It will. We all know fear. I have conquered the one that sought to overthrow my spirit. Let me tell you of that fear that I have had, Bond. I do not fear you, your country, your people. I do not fear the Dejouis woman. Mine was the fear of every parent: that I birthed my own murderer. Our children are our replacements, and to replace, one has to remove. We encourage them to become our betters. One day, the child will turn and do something that destroys the father. I feared my son.”

Head heavy…

“Family tradition?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then… stop encouraging him…”

“No. These are our destinies and one cannot prevent it. The fear was natural, sensible. Foolish to run from it, for it would remain unknown. Instead, I met it, face on. That is how a man deals with his fears, Bond. It is the only way. It became understandable, it became tangible and once tangible, I could bend it to suit me. A man of spirit, of will, can do this. What I have ensured is that he is so schooled, so educated that if it should come to pass that he kills me, it is because he needs to, to better the country, to better himself. That it will come, I am sure, but I beckon it willingly if it is for the right reason. Thus, I will not fear it. I die proudly at his hands if they are the hands of a thinker, an artist, a great man.”

“Insanity.”

“Reality. One you will not see. Hm! I digress from the bedtime story; where were we? Ah, yes: insanity. Madness. You forget your schooling. Caligula took great pleasure in destroying his enemies slowly. He would have them wounded - sometimes he would cut the wounds himself - but the vital organs were avoided. A number of small, deep wounds, so that his enemies would know that they were dying, and feel the most exquisite pain, both physically and in the burden of such knowledge.

“I have refined this. The opiate is taking effect, I see it in your eyes, they grow so pale. The blood is running free from you now. You see how your arm bleeds, yet you cannot feel it. Whilst you cannot feel it, all that you think is that there is still hope. Numb to the reality, you delude yourself. When the drug wears off, your spirit will die, crushed finally by the truth of your pain, of the hopelessness. Once the spirit dies, the body has nothing left to fight for. Whether it is the road or the crowd that flays your skin from your bones is of no concern to me, and you will find, Mr Bond, that it is of no concern to you either. You will welcome death’s release.”

Something pressing down the eyelids. Not pressing; stamping. Numb to resist it. Fight it, can’t fight it. Badly drunk; badly.

“You… you…”

Sycorax gently dabbed Bond’s unresisting brow with the hem of his cloak. Carefully, soothingly. Parentally. “You have resisted well, Mr Bond. I would not have done this had you not returned. I shall leave you to yourself to destroy. I shall leave you to whatever your mind suggests. Your conscious mind will try to force your dream, but it will struggle to prevent the torment leaking through, water through a pinprick crack, blood through a bandage. When you wake, you will vow vengeance on that mind. When you wake, you will envy the dead.” He walked to the door.

Bond turned his head; it felt light, even though the force of his doing so cracked it into the slate bed of the table. “Sycorax, you… should have listened to me. I can’t help you now.”

“Finally, truth.”

Not so bad.
Just having a quick nap, soon be back.
What shall I dream about now? Go to sleep, hold the thought, force the dream.

Pretty indistinct so far. Room’s a bit woozy. Rising up, then to the left, now down. Drag it up, falls left again, goes down. Same old feeling after one of those half-bottle-too-many Sundays, drunkenness realised too late. Bring it up, pull the room up with your eyes, stay in the room. Something pulling it down and left, down and left and down. Pull it up, damn you, so heavy on the eyes the weight of this room, and it’s slipping again, left and down and left and down.
And down.

The girl, a wonderful girl, smiling wonderful girl, pretty and laughing, throws a racing change down into third and wrenches the wheel of the… is it scarlet? No matter… the MGA. The MG TC… indistinct. Not a worry. Concentrate on the girl…
She must have driven fast, can feel her muscles humming, the speed of those blind bends still running through her. Alive, excited, ready… carrying her, muscles softened, weakened for him by the charging of the car, the thrill…
She lies back in the meadowgrass. Different girl? Can’t tell…
…doesn’t matter.
…a death worth welcoming, this. Sun shining… pretty heavenly. Can’t have been a bad life, if this is the final reward. Must have done some good things…
She’s talking, can’t hear her. Haven’t decided what she’s going to say.
Another smile, all I can see is the smile. All I want to see. Is this another girl? Can’t make out the face clearly.
Look at the grass in her hair.

Must be England. Hedgerow rushing by. Don’t get hedgerow like that anywhere else… Are we back in the car? Even faster now. Everything shooting past, can’t stop it. Can’t stop me.
Not in the car now, but cannot stop the hedgerow blasting by, can’t see it, just a blur into…
Losing control of the dream.

Has he left? Does he watch?
Did he leave?
Don’t give him the satisfaction.
Don’t.
Die.
Die?

How could Sycorax have left? The room, it has no windows. No door, no doorway. How have I come here? Same room. The blank expression of the decorated mannequin, impassive. Don’t stare at it: don’t imagine its face.
Roll from the table. Roll over and…
Die?
The floor, soft, yielding, warm. Soil.
Where is this?
I’ve imagined this. Not real.
It’s light, but where’s the light? No window, no door, no doorway.
Someone’s talking. How did they get in here?
A child is talking.
Children.
In the corner, they sit. Why do they sit away from me? What is their secret?
Ask them.
How did I come to sit amongst them? I don’t remember walking here, sitting down. Summoned by them?
Summoned?
No.
No.
Not that.
Please.

Do they even see me?
They can’t see me. They aren’t real.
They aren’t real now; they were real then. I know that face, the boy who leads the circle’s chant. I know the faces of the others, I know their fates.
I remember this.
The five boys. The girl. Yes, of course, the girl. The maid who had told them about the book. She told them. She found it, in the housemaster‘s desk. Crowley… Illicit. How had she known? How had she known about…
Yes.
Naked, all of us. Now, as the boy reads, unaware of our bodies, all of us. That was how it had been. That’s how I remember it.
Remember it?
The boy, the leader, the dark haired, lonely boy seeking friendship, seeking approval, lighting the incense, inhaling the smoke of the aloe wood, the Grimoire muttered softly, words mumbled, embarrassed. Scared.
Can’t hear all the words. Stare at his face, that face I know, and he stares back. I can’t make him look away.
I can’t change this.
Lucifer… Fabelleronthou… Aliseon, Mandousin… Casmiel… Naydru, Premy… Esmony, Eparinesont… Danochar… venite venite Lucifer!
Amen.

Had it been…?
Nothing.
The others, trembling. Such… excitement?
Yes, that’s what it was, all a glorious joke, a harmless diversion. A thrill.
I remember. The expulsion. The uncertainty, the wariness in the headmaster’s eyes. He, however, was blind. They, they had, they six, seen something else, beyond the school, beyond the…
The others in the circle. They’re still shaking.
Why are they shaking?
Around the circle, all shaking.
Me and the dark haired one, we’re still.
They others tremble, and now, from them their skin drops, autumnally, the slough of a snake. That soft plucking of the skin from the flesh, booming. Now red raw, bleeding. Meat. The girl indistinguishable from the boys, I can’t see her any more.
The one whole boy, the dark-haired boy, the boy in the mirror, the boy in the mirror every morning, no longer naked, now clothed red in their blood, not moving, not changing, unchanged and unchangeable and unmoved and unmovable.
If I reach to shake him clean, what changes?
The children in the circle now liquid, melting into the soil, the boy dirtied by them.
The boy and I, the only ones left. Can he see me? He looks away.

The twisted spokes in the rusted wheel.

The way the girl sounded when they drew her from the river, the reeds throttling her.
Pulling her from the mud.

The way the girl looked when they drew her from the river, the reeds throttling her.
They made me watch.
They marched me across the playing fields and made me watch.
Look away.
Look at the grass in her hair.

Take my hand.

It’s not real. I don’t remember this. I can’t remember this.
Which?
Suggested? Forgotten?
I don’t know. I can’t remember truth. Can’t because it didn’t happen? Can’t because I refuse?

Sycorax. In the room. Sycorax and Fajeur. Must be coming round. Look away. Back to the boy.
Boy gone.

The face in the forest.

Something like an oven; can’t see what it is, it keeps shifting out of view.

Others now. Bewick? Tempest, is that Tempest?
Tempest, I can help you. I can save you.
Others, faces I can’t see. Faces I can see and don’t remember. Can’t remember. Mustn’t remember.
All there. And all, now, paint under a gas gun, their different skins bubbling, blistering and falling from them and under them all, the same scarlet death. The blood uniform, the bodies now all the same colour, as raw as each other, nothing to differ them.
Tempest. It’s not real.
Now more, more already stripped of their skin, their faces gone. Meat. Meat. A dozen, two dozen, how many?
How many?
I taste them, taste the blood. Taste…
My own blood.
Real enough.
Being pulled out of the room now, pulled to the soil. They watch me. No eyes and still they watch.
Hands.
I know those hands.
Turn and see that bastard’s face.
Turn and turn and turn and no face, still just hands, Torpenhow’s hands clawing, pulling.
Manipulating.
Exploring.
Sinking his bastard fingers into my brain like …
Like it’s dough.
Violating.

Down into the earth, face pressed against the soil and….
Kicked awake.
Fajeur.

Lying beside him, sweating, smiling in mocking tenderness. “Pleasant dream?” The man reached his hand behind Bond’s head in embrace and pushed his own face forwards, pressing it into Bond‘s cheek. Bond, his arms heavy and deadweights, incapable of stopping it, tried to pull away as Fajeur ran the greasy tongue gently up his face, licking Bond awake. Nausea rising, Bond feared that his weakened throat would not release and even the shallow reservoir of oily spit lapping over his furred teeth would choke him.

Fajeur drew away, his eyes shining, his wet mouth glistening, pleasure etched vilely across both. Bond, finally and painlessly swallowing, could not decide which horrified him the more: that the caress and rapture were false, or that they were real.

“Get off me…” His voice was distant, leaden. Another man’s voice, not his. Could not have been his.

Fajeur ignored him. “There,” his whisper was sick with concern as he leant in once more and ran his tonguetip along Bond’s forehead, “the maman, she kisses cauchemar away, hien?”

“…I wouldn’t know.”

The policeman leant back, propping his head up on his right hand, his eyes examining Bond, who felt their touch to be as real, as intrusive, as the tongue. “That is sad, M’sieu.”

“Get away from me.”

The smile dropped. Dismissal and rejection in Fajeur’s voice as he rose. “So. Then it is time to get up.”

***

Tap tap tap.

“Stop that,” grunted Yuri.

Grigor did so and sat back on the bench, concentrating upon his feet. Concentrating upon avoiding eye contact.

“What is it?” Yuri leant against the greasy walls of his office, as relaxed as his body would let him. Little had changed. Little mattered. He had regarded the office as a cell for some time and now that it had come to pass as a fact, it had been an unremarkable alteration. “Brother?” He hoped that the voice was strong enough to haul its intended sneer.

Grigor sighed. “They tell me things. I don’t understand what it is you have done.”

“Do you need to?”

At this, Grigor did raise his head and looked directly at his prisoner. “But it would help?”

“You, perhaps. I don’t need to understand it any more. Posterity can be my explanation.”

“You are not afraid to die?”

“No. But you are afraid to kill me.”

Grigor shook his head. “They have not ordered me to do that.”

“You need to be ordered?”

“Of course.” The surprise was tangible.

Yuri did his best to smile. “Then you are my last misjudgment. I had thought it would be inevitable that once they left, you would shoot me.”

Grigor shook his head, and stretched out his arms, palm upwards. “What do you mean? I have come to talk, to understand why you have done this. I am unarmed.”

Yuri sighed, heavily. “If I was stronger, I would have called that your last misjudgment. Understand this, Grigor: I would not stop for one moment to hurt you to get out of here, to achieve what I need to.”

“This is madness.”

“No!” Yuri surprised himself at the wounded might in his voice. “No. It is… It is necessity. It did not have to be you left here to guard me. They could have left any other man. That they left you means they exploit what they think our brotherhood to be, they think it would stop me from crawling over to you and breaking your neck. Were the crawl not to kill me first. A gun would not be a weapon: you are the weapon. Do you not see that? Can you not understand why they chose you to sit with me?”

Grigor shook his head, sadly. “I chose my place here. You smile, you doubt, but it is true. You are not the only man who hurts. You are not the only man in pain. You bark it loud whilst others try to lick their wounds clean in a corner. That I do not growl, that I do not bite, does not make me any less the wolf. What has happened to you has happened to others, and will happen to more, and yet do they turn traitor? You do not answer. You cannot answer. We are all limping, brother Yuri, lamed by the world, life crippling us. We are all scarred. You are not unique. The world eats each of us and s us out. Yet, a proper man will accept it, will know that is his fate. Your undoing, my friend, is not her death and not your disease, but your vanity. Your refusal to accept that one man cannot change the world. One man is not an uprising. You need many men for a revolution; a man alone is just a traitor. The greatest betrayal is to his reason, his own self.”

Yuri drew his cracked lips back over his gums, baring. “You said that you did not understand me, oh Brother true. Yet, you speak so learnedly of my meaning.”

Grigor sighed. “I did not say that, but that you did not listen proves what else I did. I said that I did not understand the things that you have done. I meant that. I do not understand what you have done with the wiring. Neither do they. This is why you have not yet been taken away from here. They asked me to talk to you, to persuade you to change it back. No, listen. If it is only the judgment of history that you would recognise, consider who writes that history. That you were able to save the launch, a hero. In that history, one man may make a difference. One man may prove significant. That is the proposal.”

“A hero of the Soviet Union. They may even cut me a new type of medal.”

“You value it little? What of the other history, then? Let me see. Ah, nothing. The launch is delayed, that is an embarrassment, but ultimately the launch will happen and you never will have. Where your life once was, nothing. They will remove you from the records; you never worked here. You were never schooled. You were never born. They will purge. They will disappear the dust you have left, and if there was a way in which they could recapture the air you have breathed, they would do it. I will be required to forget and it will be little hardship to comply. Harder will be that the tales I have already told of you, of you both, to your children must be rewritten as fairy stories. No new ones will I tell them. Then they will be what they nearly are: mine. All it will take is one push of the truth, a gentle guiding father’s hand.”

Yuri spat, the venomous crackle of a fresh-lit fire.

“Yes, I am unarmed, but I see that I can still cut deep,” Grigor continued. “Die the hero, or never have been. You are not important enough to have been the villain, not a foe that merits the respect of a memory. All that shouting you have done would be for nothing. Nothing. You may as well have screamed at the clouds and thrown rocks at the sky. Not even the silent screaming of the ghost, for the ghost must once have lived. If your vanity wishes your sacrifice remembered, if your loyalty to her if not to me requires some recognition, and if not by a state you care little for then by your children, for whom I know that you once did care, there is only one way. If you must, consider me now your hated enemy rather than your trusted friend.

“It has been interesting, watching you. Encouraging you. Encouraging your bitterness, your determination that you have been wronged.” Grigor lit a cigarette, and did not offer one. “It is harder for a clever man to pretend to be a fool than a foolish one clever. I saw you thinking, I saw your hatred, I saw your vanity: I admit that I did not see this, this thing that you have done, not precisely, but even I am not so clever. Perhaps a little more than you gave me credit for, however. See it this way: if you gain something, I lose nothing. Indeed, I gain the pride of being related to a great hero. If you choose to lose , I gather it all in. In all your wit, your brain, you never recognised my own ambition, that I would wish to be exploited by them, that I would choose to be willing to make this proposal. The howling wolf, so feared, announces himself as a target. The mute hunter is rarely shot. I knew that the glory would be so evidently distasteful to you, but your shame so readily meets my purpose. If you thought your purpose was to shape history, then you have achieved that. So, I chose to come in here. If you leave with me, we leave as men remembered. If I leave alone, the truth will become that there will never have been anyone in here to have walked with me.

“Yet, I cannot make you choose. No force is pressed on you. Not by me. Not by anyone. Brother.”

***

They left him.

They dragged him to the hotel garage, and left him.

To himself.

Upon the floor they threw him, and upon the floor he shivered himself wet.

Whatever it had been, it had taken him, it had taken him entirely and now, its work done, it fled from him, it bled from him in iced rivers that he could not dam. Staring at his clawed hands shaking, Bond knew that his head shook too, his eyes ready to rattle free and his entire body convulsed in an epilepsy of fear, guilt, disgust. An urge to vomit, yet nothing with which to. The brain, piledriving against his skull with a free-form, unknowable rhythm, smashed away thoughts as soon as they sprang, but they grew back double, then double-double until they overwhelmed him, chattering him, screaming him into submission and the blessed relief of blackout.

It cannot have been.
It cannot have been.
I cannot have been.
I cannot…

“What did you see?” Sycorax leant against the garage wall, watching as Fajeur tied the thick, greasy rope around Bond’s unyielding, listless wrists. “Did you see him, the Count Astaroth?”

Bond, stenched with his own wetness, kneeling, facing a floor puddled with what he had been, shook his head loosely, woozily. “No. No. You failed. Despite all your rant, all your suggestion that I should. all that rubbish you talked. Is that how it works, Sycorax? Suggested memories, some cheap hypnosis; so cheap there’s not even a coin to swing?” Stop the room bloody moving. Still going left and down. Left and down. Still drunk; bad hangover…

Sycorax stared at him, unblinking. “Hm. But you saw something. Your mind made you.”

“No. Nothing.” Bond watched as Fajeur pulled the rope tight, a blush of fresh blood seeping through; he could not feel it. The numbness persisted. Let it. When it lifts… “Grateful for the sleep. Thanks. Been… a rough day.”

“No, there was something. There always is. Your mouth moved. I wonder what it may have been? Interesting that you deny it. Interesting that you cannot face telling me. Your mind, Mr Bond, is an unusually vicious and treacherous one, for now it tries to convince you that all is well, and nothing happened. It wants you to forget a dirty little incident so it can hurt you once more with it, if given the opportunity. Tell no-one; keep it a little secret. Such cruelty. Your mind abuses you, Bond, and is trying to force you to deny it.

“My friend, you face a choice. If you accept the lie you tell yourself, then further doses of the drug will unlock it all the more vividly, shattering the glass under which it had all been buried, letting it leak through, poisoning you. Next time you may find it much harder to repair the cracks. If you reject what your mind wants, the consequence is that you will lose it; alternatively, it loses you.”

Fajeur smiled. “Such a dilemma.”

Bond sniffed. “Why not just leave me to it then? Why this?” He made to raise his bound wrists, but still his muscles screamed impotently, and the movement was no more than a defenceless tremble. Catching the glint of greedy desire in Fajeur’s face, the eyes and mouth both salivating in recognition of opportunity, Bond muttered, “Call the dog off, Sycorax.”

To his surprise, Sycorax nodded, clicking his right thumb and forefinger and pointing Fajeur away. The policeman shrugged, rejected once more, and busied himself with the winch around which he wrapped the remaining length of rope, and checking the fastness of the bolts fixing it to the lorry’s flatbed platform.

Sycorax approached. “At present, you still cling onto the sole benefit of the drug. That blissful ignorance of the state of your body will soon be overborne by the reality. Dragging you through the streets will speed that process. I shall stand on this platform, I shall wave to my people and we shall all watch you dying as your government’s control dies along with you. And when the pain hits, Mr Bond, your mind will want you to pull your way up that rope to where Consul Fajeur will be sitting, his promise of the needle so tempting, so very nearly in reach, body so very painful now… and he has his instructions to let the winch out, to spool the rope away. Not like a fish, reeled in. Reeled out indeed, to die, to drown in your pain. I may encourage the crowd to help. I have the crowd, Bond.”

They put those ideas in your mind. They weren’t real.

“It will be interesting to watch you choose. Do you let yourself be loosed out, to die in pain, denying your mind’s demand for solace in the drug, knowing that another dose will bring again whatever it was you saw, or worse, to drive you into madness? Or do you fight your way up, such physical effort, how brave, to receive the needle, to sink back into comfort, to welcome those visions once more and to realise only too late that his own mind and memory are the most savage weapons a man ever faces? One wonders what damages a man more: a splinter of glass, or one of the mind?

“Every time I have seen this, the choice has always been the drug. Death comes slowly, outwardly quietly. Inside, the soul is imploding in its own guilt. If, as you say, you saw nothing, Mr Bond, then you have made your choice. Or perhaps it is your mind lying to you, lying to you for it wishes to hurt you yet more.” Sycorax crouched down, and pushed Bond’s chin up with the tip of bone. “The dose you took was nothing; you see that in how quickly you recover. A sample. No charge. The next one will be five times the strength. Remember that, if you can, when the pain starts and you want it to stop.” He lowered Bond’s head, which did not resist.

Bond stared at the floor. “Forget the speeches, Sycorax. I won’t be voting.”

“Enough. Do you know where you are? Of course you do. It was here you destroyed a man of this country. A good man, a son. It is appropriate that from here you are taken to your death.”

Bond sighed, heavily. “Torpenhow was right. All this… you’re distracted by me. You’re making it easier for her. You aren’t concentrating, Sycorax. Don’t get on the bloody lorry, don’t ride through the streets. You’re just a target.”

“All that you distract me from is my diary, my papers and records. Still, what would you have me do?”

“Let me go. I’ll find her and I’ll stop her.”

“Hm! Even if you were in a fit state to do so, I remember you telling me your pity for me had expired. Why should I believe you now?”

Bond took a deep breath and forced his heavy head upwards, pushing hopelessly at an anchor from beneath. “Perhaps I did see something; someone crying out for mercy. Help. Understanding. Compassion, forgiveness. I don‘t know.”

Sycorax walked to the back of the platform and took Fajeur’s hand to help him up. Three more sashed policemen, armed, sprang up after him.

“Interesting,” rumbled Sycorax. “But, tell me, on a practical level, do you know what she looks like? No, I thought not. I reject your proposal. You please me, in that you saw something, yes… Now it plays with you, gnaws at you. You are hurt, inside, and it refuses to let the wound in your mind heal. Hm.”

It didn’t happen.

“I will allow you this, Bond: I have been impressed with your strength. But now, inescapably, you are just another man. If you did not understand what it was you saw, my friend, you have the opportunity to see it again, if you so dare. You are free to choose.”

“Unlike your people.” Bond dropped his head once more, still leadweight. “This display is worthless. By my reckoning, you haven’t been elected yet, not for another couple of hours. You’ll die for nothing,. You’ll die without power.”

It didn’t happen like that.

“No.” The voice was infused with a paternalistic benevolence. “It is already decided. Don’t be naïve. In any event, it is standard political play to convince the people one has won before the result is through. When that is confirmed to the world, indeed two hours yet, I shall be away from here. I shall be with my son. But make no mistake; I already run this country. I am this country. Every time you have wounded it, you have wounded me. Killing you will let us heal.”

“You could just kill me now.”

“Not at all. I need to make an example of you. Now, it is time to talk to other people, people to whom I can promise a future. Mr Bond, it would be better for you if you tried to stand.”

The lorry’s engine thundered into life, the sound booming around the concrete walls. Bond thought his head would burst. Shuffling forwards on his knees, he forced his right foot before him and pushed upwards; a rush of lightheadedness overcame him, and he pitched head first to the ground, his face cracking into it but the sensation no more than as if it had been cotton wool. When does the pain start? Come on, start, damn you!

Start me dying.

Get it over with.

The watching choir of policemen bayed, merrily.

Pushing himself up on his elbows, Bond looked to the back of the platform, to where Fajeur sat, his legs dangling, right arm resting on the winch lever. The ghastly houndface split into a vicious grin. The policeman, licking his lips, extended his left arm. Bond crawled towards it, his bound hands outstretched, nearly there, reaching for the offered hand…

Fajeur withdrew it sharply, and howled into laughing as Bond fell forwards again.

Such a funny game, darling. When I kill you…

Breathing more diesel than air, Bond forced himself up and felt all eyes on him, those of the men on the lorry and the symbols on the wall. Sycorax, nodding gently, turned away. Fajeur stared, glared; to Bond, it was a hellish mix of fascination, admiration, desire, hatred. Smiling, the Consul crooked the index finger of his left hand, beckoning Bond on; with his right, he slammed down onto the platform.

The lorry jerked forwards, plucking Bond from where he had stood.

Floating…

Bond crunched into to the floor, and now he was moving at speed, his body at full stretch, skidding face forwards after the lorry, towards the garage exit, towards pain, towards death. Smothering him and horribly raucous as the vehicle slowed to turn into the street, the demonic cackling of the victors.
***

He had read a book - perhaps he had read too many, for clever people read of life whilst wise people live it - about how Italian gangsters operated; when an enemy wanted you dead, they sent one’s good friend to do it. Now sitting at his desk, the effort of standing in the face of Grigor’s words having proven too much for him, Yuri accepted the parallel.

This was no offer, but it would not be one he would accept readily, or be seen to. Grigor had played a good hand: it was foolish to deny it. A bluff fellow: how true. Yuri glanced at him: Grigor sat smoking, relaxed and confident and, when he met Yuri’s gaze, smiled in encouragement of a response.

Was there still time for one more hand, winner takes all? As they stood, the stakes were harsh: if he helped them, they would still shoot him but bury the truth alongside his body. If he refused, or did not help in time, even the bullet would be denied.

The children…

That had not been bluff.

The greed in Grigor’s eyes had given him away. How to deny him that, yet still achieve? Bluff. To be seen to help, but to engineer something that could not possibly have been his fault, so no blame could attach. They would have to cast him the medal. They would have to keep his children his. Too many people had worked on this for there not to have been flaws, exploitable flaws. Find that, and one finds one’s cause, and the blame shifts. That had to be it. It would mean another man denied, another family evaporated, but not his. Not his.

He cleared his throat, croaking for Grigor’s attention. “Very well.” A convincingly contrite sigh. “Third drawer down in the cabinet beside you, fourth folder in. Hand me that. Let me see if I can undo what is done.”

Some pleasure yet capable of being gathered from Grigor’s evident disappointment, and just as swiftly falling from his grasp as Grigor, reassuring himself of impossibility, muttered “You know that it is but two hours to countdown?”.

“Then you had better hand me them more quickly than that.”

***

Stand up.

The lorry slowed, chanted into a halt by the building crowd. Through the choking dust now clearing, Bond watched the shadows swirl, unreal in their shifting cloudforms but undeniably men, probably armed and, he told himself, likely to be instructed to tear him apart. Damn you. I’m not dying on my knees, you bastards.

He pressed his fists into the dirty dampness of the road’s sharp gravel and pushed himself up to his knees, then staggered forwards until he stood. With still some give in the loose rope, Fajeur having proved himself a generous guardian of the winch, Bond let his wrists drop and started after the platform. As he walked, slacklimbed, the crowd in the cloud became clearer to him and him to them. What had sounded celebratory had now fallen silent, in curiosity or, worse, in waiting for a signal. His mouth full of the road grit, he spat violently and shook both legs to release the dirt, but it clung on. Still, he considered, he was now marginally more presentably ready for slaughter.

He looked down at his raw arms, the skin torn from them in strips, old wallpaper hanging. He breathed deeply. When the pain came, when that single distant cloud in the wide blue sky built relentlessly to thunder, what would it be like? How could he stop it?

Bury the thought. Stop thinking.

Better that it’s unimaginable. If I imagine it…

As the lorry stopped, a loudhailer screeched into life, the tinny squeal piercing the fog, piping Bond’s concentration back on board.

Giving her an easy target.

Bond, careful not to engage the wide, hating eyes of the mass lest any man should see it as a challenge, glanced swiftly around him. The street was wide enough to take a five-man deep crowd and still leave ten feet between him and the front of it, both sides. Those at the back were pressed against shopfronts, broken or burned or both, and Bond could see some jumping up to get a better look at what was about to happen.

To him.

He guessed at fifty either side, and a quick glimpse behind him, disguised as wiping his forehead on his right shoulder, suggested fifty more there, gathering together as the dust cleared, closing the circle. The way in which Sycorax stood on the flatbed, loudhailer raised in readiness and facing away, down the street, indicated many more unseen ahead.

The spectators gathered, the conquered brought before the Circus, the lions ready to pounce.

The hunter ready to kill.

Bond looked at the buildings above them. Little point trying to identify the tell-tale open window for the sniper; all had lost their glass, if not their frames, most with razor sharp jags jutting upwards; bad teeth. She could have been at any one of them. No, not any: the lorry had come to rest under the splayed leaves of a giant, leathery palm that blocked the view from at least ten of the windows on the right hand side. As Bond reconsidered the platform, ignoring the fixed and fixated grinning of Fajeur, he noted that the other policemen were crouching, each with his gun raised upwards, gentling sweeping his designated line of shops.

Sycorax had indeed been clever. Bond cursed himself for thinking the man a fool.

The crowd? She had boasted of her talent for male impersonation. Bond shot some quick glances around him. Behind one of these eager faces, sweat and dust caking the features, did the burning eyes fix him back? No way of checking. From this level, Sycorax was a clear and still target.

Bond cursed himself for thinking the man wise.

“Friends,” Sycorax started, the depth of the voice amplified into a thundering roar, “my friends, my people. Today, we live. Today, we see what we have become, and today we should be proud of it. We were once children suffering a cruel parent. Now we have matured, now we can see ourselves.”

Bond spat on the floor, to clear the sand from his mouth. A jiggle of the rope told him that Fajeur had taken it as defiance. A mild rebuke. Bond still avoided the policeman’s gaze. A voice from the crowd shouted something in words Bond did not understand, but in a tone far too familiar.

“And we see others.” Sycorax swung his hook around, behind him, and the bodybulk followed, as did the eyes of the spectators. All stared at Bond: Bond fixed his own eyes on the mouth of Sycorax’s loudhailer, staring down a gunbarrel, waiting for the moment the killing words were fired, ready to dodge their spray. “Look at them. Look how they are cowed and broken before us.” Sycorax jabbed the bone towards Bond. “Once it was us who walked these streets in chains: now it is them at my chariot-wheels dragged bound. This city, their city, a city that we shall burn back to the ground before this month is through, a city built on roads your chained fathers, grandfathers, dug at gunpoint. Now see who walks them captive, while we walk free. You have voted for your freedom. The Empire has failed. This is not their land; it is ours, it is yours, my friends. Their paradise is lost; ours, regained.”

Death by oratory.

“We start with the land, the land into which the bones of so many of us have decayed over too many years. We build a new country, not as chained labour but as fellows, as a people driving towards one goal. There are no masters and no servants. We are answerable only to each other, not cruel lords many seas distant. On this day, a long-remembered day, our destinies become our own. Our fates are our own. These are not privileges; they are the rights of a free man, rights denied us by those who would chain us.”

Something…

A pinprick. Another injection? No; no-one had dared approach. But in the wrists, the rubbed raw wrists, a definite sensation. Building. An itch, now a sting, now…

Bond must have winced, must have shown something, to Fajeur at least, for the rope tautened, the scalding pain accelerated up his shattered arms and he shuffled forwards. Doing so fired a harsh spasm up his right hand side and he dropped to a crouch, his face crumpled to brace the advancing hurt. He knew then what would come: not just the pain of Fajeur’s earlier attack, but everything he had been allaying since the crash-landing, everything the little painkillers had suppressed and, he had deluded himself, cured.

He was going to die.

Raising his head, shards of burning glass piercing, punching into his neck as he did so, he met Fajeur’s gaze. The policeman leered in satisfaction, released the winch lever to let the rope spool to slack and drew from his shirt pocket the syringe. He laid it across his opened right palm, in temptation, in invitation.

The crowd shuffled, ready to spring. Above the din of his heartbeat crashpounding his head, Bond heard Sycorax’s harsh howl. “Do not approach him! Stay back! See, see this my friends, see how they thought in all their arrogance that we must be dependent upon them; no, it is they who depend on us!”

The crowd roared. Bond’s head joined in, throwing itself backwards, forcing his mouth open, a soundless scream.

He dropped facedown as if thrown, and lay flat.

And at the sudden snap of gunshot, all did.