The Second Adventure: A Cat Called Britain (A Caper in Time Part 1)
by Evan Forman and Michael Robertson - 22.12.14
The long black limousine
snaked around bustling street corners where creatures in sagging
jeans and tight skirts howled at the neon-lit night. Aerin was
silent the whole journey, and Dhubagèl hadn't moved from his
statuesque pose of cool indifference, his elbow on the
windowsill, watching the world quietly slide past his
blacked-out window. They both sat in the back of the car which
could have probably sat ten people and came equipped with a bar
and a boxy little TV at the end. But the thought had crossed
neither of their minds; pleasantries had served their purpose
now that the doors had been locked.
The car slid to a stop outside a huge, regal building. Without
speaking, Dhubagèl unfolded his limbs out onto the street and
threw the door shut behind him with a flick of his wrist. Aerin
promptly scuttled out as quickly and quietly as he could. He
shut the door and the black capsule tore away up the street
between rows of white streetlamps and disappeared into the
horizon. Dhubagèl strode towards the light shining through the
large glass door with his spidery legs, one hand shielding his
spectacles from the falling mist of rain. Aerin quietly followed
him like he was attached with an invisible thread, into the
building's grand foyer, across the red carpet and into the
wood-panel elevator. Dhubagèl pressed the button for the top
floor. Aerin felt dizzy as the light climbed up the glass dots
and counted down to whatever fate awaited him.
"Are you scared, Aerin?"
He'd jumped at the first syllable. "Um, no..." His stomach
churned.
Dhubagèl smiled and quietly laughed through his nose. "Good."
The gold doors parted and Dhubagèl stepped through. He seemed to
exist in complete isolation from the rest of the world, not even
noticing the other people in the corridor who gave Aerin strange
looks. They approached the room at the end of the hall: 879.
Dhubagèl held the doorknob and looked back at Aerin to see if
he'd caught up. He did a strange wriggle of the shoulders, as if
he were preparing to go onstage, and opened the door.
As soon as it cracked open, light and smoke and music hit Aerin
in the face and poured out into the dim hall like a torrent of
snakes. Dhubagèl gestured for him to come in quickly and he was
shut inside a singing, giggling, smoking mass of semi-naked
bodies writhing across the floor in synchronisation with some
god-awful din and pressed together in the centres of cheering
circles. They picked their way across a kaleidoscope spew of
clothes or exotic costumes, a rolling landscape out of which
pierced towers or mountains of glassware of all shapes sizes and
colours, voices blending into music and bright young faces
melting into one another when their wild eyes weren't staring
out at Aerin from the fleshy hearts of the hungering hullabaloo.
Aerin was given an overfilled glass of champagne, handed to him
by Dhubagèl, handed to Dhubagèl by gods know who or what but the
glass was the coldest thing in the humid den and Dhubagèl's hand
clasped around his wrist was his only compass. They reached a
more open space and Aerin just about felt he could breathe as
pairs of made-up glitterpixies circled around him and rejoined
arms as they meandered into the depths of the skin forest.
Dhubagèl darted ahead to the black and red altar from which a
warbling violin and screeching guitar wobbled out into the hazy
atmosphere of the room. He approached the waltzing rainbow disc
on the top and with one crane-like arm, lifted the needle off
the noise and the sound cut.
Voices died down as some of the people wearing masks or tails or
paint turned around to see where the music had gone. Dhubagèl
paid no mind to them as he stood up on a table and yelled
"RIGHT! Home time, children! Go on, out the door! Off you fuck,
you beautiful creatures!"
He blew pantomime kisses to the grumbling partygoers as they
started to funnel out, some of them shouting at Dhubagèl from
behind the crowd. He put a hand on his hip and laughed. "You
don't like it? Then go! Try to find someone in the world who
fucks you like I fuck you!" He downed his glass and tossed it
behind him. "And then come back next week! Once you've realised
that NOBODY gets fucked like they get fucked here!"
A few more insults and the last person to leave slammed the door
behind them.
Dhubagèl span around to Aerin. "Right! You!" His limbs were
swinging wildly. "Go check the bedroom for weirdos dressed as
foxes, there's always one. I'll go out and check that the babes
haven't littered the entire hall with illicit substances where
children might reach them." He sprung off the table - which
Aerin thought was mildly amazing for a man in his mid-to-late
50s - and manoeuvred around the mess which had taken over the
otherwise minimally decorated apartment.
Aerin carefully walked over to the back end of the place which
was split up into the large square room in which most of the
debauchery had taken place; a rectangular kitchen or dining area
with a wall-to-ceiling window out of which he could see a
constellation of white and yellow dots expanding east towards
the border where a black forest met a black sky. Near the dining
table below this window - old and intricately ornate compared to
the mass-produced geometry of the rest of the house - this
section closed into a small corridor which led back out into a
wide open bedroom.
Dhubagèl closed the door behind them and swiped a bottle off a
dresser. He turned to Aerin while shaking it. "Right, close your
eyes."
"Why?" Aerin jammed his eyes shut just before the watery spray
hit him in the face.
"What's that smell? Is that some kind of perfume?" He wiped his
eyes and blinked open.
"Rum." Dhubagèl replied, spraying a couple more times around
Aerin.
"But why?"
"To support our story." He chucked the bottle over on one of the
pillows.
"What story?" Aerin swallowed, his heart pounding half-terrified
but half-curious.
"This one." Dhubagèl put a hand on Aerin's chest and shoved him
backward. Preparing for an impact, his whole body folded and
tensed up before becoming enveloped in the obscenely comfortable
bed. Before he had time to think, Dhubagèl was on top of him
like a spider about to devour a helpless fly.
Aerin panicked. "What are you doin-"
"Shhhh..." The soft, full flesh of his lips was pressed shut by
a finger. Dhubagèl, much stronger than his slender, elegant
frame would suggest, took Aerin's wrist and pinned down over his
head. With his other hand, he reached into the breast pocket of
his jacket and pulled out some kind of metal cuff, whose cold
steel sent a slight shiver across the surface of Aerin's skin as
it clicked shut around his wrist.
Dhubagèl smiled and rolled over onto the other side of the bed
as Aerin sat up and examined the device on his arm. "Now don't
take that off!" said Dhubagèl as he clipped one around his own
wrist. "It freezes the geographical co-ordinates on that chip
inside your hand, with a little bit of movement now and then to
avoid suspicion." He shot up off the bed and into the bathroom.
"If somebody checks your trail, they'll see that I plucked you
from a party, we got absolutely pissed and fell asleep in my bed
- leaving not a lot to the electric eye's...fertile
imagination."
Dhubagèl got up and impatiently walked through into the
bathroom. Aerin followed to find him raking behind a sink. He
fiddled with his bracelet nervously. "But if someone saw that
we'd fallen asleep in the same bed, they'll think we..."
"Probably. Or perhaps these two offensively attractive bohemians
were just too tuckered out to get home. Bless."
Aerin froze. "But if people knew about that, wouldn't we be..."
Dhubagèl pulled out some sort of key. "The new O.T.P. of the
Dryadoran intelligentsia?"
"...thrown into a fire as fuel for a witch burning?"
Dhubagèl chuckled. "It's not above the people who monitor our
movements to try selling this kind of information to the rags,
but don't worry about the papers: I AM the papers. Mostly.
There's always the Mail, but I wouldn't want to sully my
banknotes with their grubby fingers." He slid back the glass
door to the large shower and stepped inside, turning one of the
knobs on the wall and pulling it off to reveal a keyhole behind
it.
"So...where are you taking me?" asked Aerin.
"I'd have thought you'd been given some kind of idea. Or do the
Collisterran networks operate on a 'need-to-know' policy?"
"Um...I don't know, I suppose I didn't need to."
"Well, you don't need to know quite yet, either." He turned the
keyhole multiple times in both directions, mumbling to himself
as he remembered some kind of combination. "Not even a clue?"
Aerin threw out a small fake laugh.
"Oh, come on Aerin, we're alone now, you don't need to play
innocent bystander anymore." There was a gentle thud, and the
sliding of heavy machinery.
"I don't think I know what you mean."
Finally, the hidden door cracked open from the wall. "Oh, come
on. The fidgeting hands, the fake, fake veneer of having a clue
what you're doing, the obsessive blinking..."
Aerin blinked in denial.
"...you almost had me at first, thought I'd grabbed the wrong
Aerin." He pulled the heavy door open. "You first, then."
Aerin nervously walked through the shower and into a dark, musty
crawlspace behind the wall. "Dhubagèl, I don't think you
understand: I literally have no idea what's going on here."
"All in good time, Aerin," Dhubagèl purred, the 'creepy old man'
thing not being an affectation from his opening act. "All in
good time." He closed the door, which creaked as it shut out the
glaring bathroom light.
There were three torches on hooks nailed into the gray concrete
brickwork. Dhubagèl took two and handed one to Aerin. "Right,
this way. Don't worry about making too much noise, I had the
walls built too thick for that." They shuffled sideways through
the stuffy, claustrophillic square tube (Aerin had fostered a
fascination with small and secret places as a child, curled up
in cupboards and attics hiding from seekers and angry parents),
the beams of white torchlight full with dust particles kicked up
by their movements. "Some of the builders did inform me that my
blueprints were an awfully inefficient use of space, and did
leave lots of gaps like this, but I fed them wads of money and
muttered something about the inner aesthetics being everything
and here we are." One at a time, they squeezed out of a crack at
the end of the crawlspace and out into another gap where a room
should be. "Now, do be very careful, just one of these items is
probably worth more than your life."
Aerin shone his torch around the room. Dhubagèl could barely
walk around for all the cardboard boxes filled with scraps and
trinkets. Even if the floor were clear, they'd still be
constricted by the shelves overflowing with books, stacks of
newspapers, folders, files and strange objects in glass cases.
"Here it is, this may be of particular interest to you."
Aerin took the object from Dhubagèl, and shone his torch on the
old and tatty book. Whatever kind of illustration there was on
the front had faded into unrecognisability, and only by pointing
the torch at exactly the right angle could he read the outlines
of where gold foil lettering used to be. His eyes widened, his
heart felt like it stopped and he silently gasped a lungful of
dusty air before launching into a restrained coughing fit. He
collected himself and held the torch back up to the book: The
Black Crown Rises, by Aerin Liette.
"Any relation?" Dhubagèl smiled.
Aerin lingered in his wonder for a few more moments. "Not that I
know of...no."
Dhubagèl held out his hand, and Aerin reluctantly gave it back.
"What's it about? Have you read it? Is it any good?"
Dhubagèl laughed out loud. "Utter. Shite."
Aerin felt himself physically shrink. He pushed a pile of books
upright and slid the artefact back into its place.
"It's a first edition, centuries old, you can tell because of
all the differences between it and current printings. The last I
heard, there's a few more historical printings in the world,
each consecutive reprint is a more unbelievable and jingoistic
biography of Praeon Valler II than the last."
"What do you mean?"
"History is a lie, Aerin." He straightened up, as if he were
delivering lines from a play. "A lie that nations tell
themselves so they can sleep at night, so they can celebrate
holidays and have barbeques and beer. So they can win wars for
the moral high ground and ensure that their way of life - the
good way, the holy way - can spread across the next century like
a cancer of time." He adjusted his glasses which had slid down
during the theatrical gestures. "Old sins are baptised in red
tape, old promises turn out to have never been made when history
defies the whims of the present moment." He stepped over some
boxes, coming closer towards Aerin. "Do you remember school,
Aerin?" He snarled with disdain. "Do you remember how they
taught you about Good King Praeon and how he united the human
tribes under one banner, how he brought civilisation and
religion to those savages? That's a lie, too. This room is where
we keep the truth tucked away safely, where a noble and
accomplished people is hidden in old boxes on dusty shelves.
There are other places like it, but only a few that I know of."
Aerin picked his way to the centre of the room and tried to take
in all of its contents.
"So...what really happened? When did the elves take power?"
"Well, the war started about...180 years ago? Give or take."
"And then they started to rewrite history?"
"Well, first they had to write it. People like Aerin Liette,
authors and poets wrote books and songs about the elvin
victories, of the unholy state of the human towns and cities.
Which do actually have a basis in truth: the eastern kingdoms -
Magnusshire, Valenshire, Lautusshire - did collapse in on
themselves before the Dryadoran invasion. We're talking about
'human sacrifices in the street and mothers smothering their
babies' levels of collapse. By the end of the war, so much death
and madness made mass necromancy seem like a perfectly
reasonable option."
He paused, and Aerin jumped in. "Wait, was that 'the War of the
Dead'?"
"Yes. Using the darkest magic there is, every single grave in
Lautusshire and Magnusshire was dug up and thrown back at the
enemy for one last whirl. A war fought by over 200,000 soldiers
with almost zero human casualties; everyone was already dead. It
nearly worked. But after years of horror, seeing some familiar
faces on the battlefield couldn't scare away the elves for
long."
Aerin's skin crawled. He stood in the centre of the room and
scanned the dusty old archive with his torch, trying to
comprehend the death of civilization.
"But...why? What started all of that?"
"That's the thing: we don't know." Dhubagèl delivered his words
with perfect precision; he'd had this talk before. "During and
after the war, they incinerated so many books and documents it's
hard to separate the truth from the bullshit. We can tell there
was some kind of religious purge; there's some insane babbling
in hidden journals about the end of days - red skies over fields
died black with ash. The official records are fiction, the real
accounts are delusional. It does make things complicated."
Aerin's torch fell upon a large object covered by a white sheet.
"What's that?"
"Oh!" Dhubagèl was clearly impatient to get to the wall which
the object was propped up against, but was slowed down as he
twisted over and around the priceless miscellany. "You know the
story of how our little gang got started, yes?"
"No, I don't."
"The old legend goes like this..." He carefully placed his torch
on one of the shelves, pointing it so the light spread evenly
across the dusty cover. "The Red Hand first arrived in Dryadora
from the Abyss in the north - a savage wilderness of barbarians
and monsters, both just as likely to boil you alive and eat you
- perhaps even from as far up as the tundra." He searched a
stack of papers and took out a worn old map of the continent,
encased in a plastic sheet that wobbled as he pulled it out.
"They were an army whose origins lie in the south of Collisterra,
as a small clan of pirates or mercenaries who stormed prisons
and scoured the tribelands for new recruits." He drew his finger
side to side, covering the length and breadth of the paper
desert. "They would flatten the villages, pull the heads off
their leaders and do the same to every man and childless woman
who refused to join them in their conquest. They never bothered
the cities, so the government - this was back when Collisterra
had a government - didn't actually do anything to stop them,
despite their speeches and public condemnations. Because they
could see Praeon trampling over the east, and they knew that no
stone wall was going to keep him from marching on their sands
eventually. They even closed the gate for the first time in
centuries..." He pointed to the border between Collisterra and
Valenshire. "...just so they didn't even have to get involved
with the refugees." He paused.
"What does that have to do with us?"
Dhubagèl looked up from his map. "I was just about to get to-"
"Okay, okay."
"The name 'Red Death' travelled quicker than the camels that
carried his soldiers, and towns would fall to their knees and
lay down their weapons as he approached." Dhubagèl's finger
swept over the great wall of cliffs to the jagged, rocky
landscape north of the desert. "His army finally reached Orcadia.
The Red Death was well aware that the Orcadian defence is
completely and absolutely impenetrable, so he circumvented any
actual declaration of war by using some sort of hereditary title
to merely challenge each and every Orc over the age of 18 to a
duel. They could forfeit the duel at any time, but if they did
they'd be conscripted into his army."
Aerin laughed a little in disbelief. "Okay, what happened next?"
"Two weeks and a quarter of a million new recruits later..." his
finger shot over the Abyss to the impossibly huge mountain
ranges opposite Orcadia "...they charged over the stone bridges
into Astor and spent about three months down there. The Dwarven
tunnels were cramped and dark, full of forgotten cities and
bloodthirsty scavengers. Some of his soldiers went mad, many
ended up committing utterly terrifying war crimes we still
haven't thought up names for yet. But I'll spare you the
details."
He slid the map back onto a shelf. Aerin jumped in.
"Fascinating, but what does that have to do with us?"
"Right! That! You know how this city is neatly divided into
little slices by the rivers?"
"Yes?"
"It wasn't always like that. There are countless novels from the
time of humans describing Dryadora as a city falling over
itself, a shambolic brick and cobblestone nightmare that reeks
of piss and murder. In that order. Almadinah's cliché was
'bustling markets', Lieopes got 'grand cathedrals', Magnus had
its 'imposing castle walls'. Us? 'Piss and murder', 'where the
women keep their hair up with shivs', 'delicious rats, though'.
But that's besides the point. So, you ask, what happened to
Dryadora?" Dhubagèl finally had his cue to grab the sheet and
throw it to the floor. "HE happened."
Aerin's whole body froze. Dhubagèl enthused at the large oil
painting. "This is my most prized possession. It's not the
original, but it's the only one left in the world. The Red Death
and his mighty army came barrelling down the Abyss on great wood
and metal machines and on the backs of captured monsters. They
broke down the Northern Wall with the technology of the Dwarves,
pillaged the farms and towns with the glee of the Pirates,
terrorised the survivors with the roars of the Abyssal beasts
and crushed all the soldiers who were sent to stop them with the
might of the Orcs."
Aerin struggled to avert his gaze from the painting as he
stepped over the various objects on the floor. Dhubagèl's
enthusiasm faded. "Alas, The Red Death was met at the gates of
Dryadora by the entire massed armies of King Praeon's newly
formed empire." Dhubagèl stood back next to Aerin to appreciate
the picture, his hands behind his back. "It was a war for
history itself, the last great battle ever fought in this land.
And we lost. By some cruel absence of fate, he lost. The Red
Hand's city-burning days are long over, but we still fight to
keep the story alive."
Aerin inspected the painted landscape. What was once the city of
Dryadora lit up the background below a constellation of flaming
arrows which tore across the night sky. In the fields on the
left of the painting, little elvin soldiers were being chewed up
and spat out by demonic creatures with five faces. The
composition was dominated by the figure of The Red Death
himself, standing on a cliff and literally painted red with what
looked like the blood of his enemies. Despite the huge black
beard with framed his grimace, Aerin still recognised his face
instantly. He wore some steel vambraces on his wrists, the pelt
of a monster whose stuffed face roared at the viewer, and a gold
metal eyepatch decorated to look like another open eye. In his
right hand he held an axe, bloodied by the elvin soldier who lay
dead behind him. And in his left hand, raised defiant against
the black night, was a flaming red scimitar.