Conflagration by Mick Farren Read Free Book Online Page B

Had it been caused to happen, and, if so, by whom or what? She had been taught by T’saya never to question what could not be explained. If it worked, one should simply accept it. Oonanchek had said the same thing. The interlude had brought all three of them a combination of both peace and ecstatic excitement, and her dreams of the white figures had completely ceased. Jesamine had been happy, and she accepted her happiness as a great if unexplainable gift.
    But now the interlude was ending. The gift was spent. In the tiny tent that Oonanchek had raised for the ritual of severance, the cut cord that was the symbol of their too-brief intimacy lay on the blanket in front of Jesamine, like something that had once lived but was now dead.
    “You are free, Jesamine; free to return to your companions, to The Four, to your true takla .”
    Magachee held Jesamine from behind, cradling and comforting her, stroking her hair, like a mother about to send a child out into the world. Oonanchek brought Jesamine’s uniform. Still dizzy from the smoke, she shook her head, then rose, still free and naked. Magachee leaned forward and kissed her thigh one last time. She took the uniform from Oonanchek. A small leather medicine bag lay on top of the carefully folded garments. She looked questioningly at him and he smiled. “A final gift. A part of us to take with you. And the summons for the Quodoshka. ”
    Jesamine frowned. “I have nothing to give to you in return.”
    “You have given and continue to give.”
    “But…”
    “We need speak no more of it.”
    Jesamine nodded and slowly started to dress. Putting on the uniform felt too much like strapping on armor for a coming and terrible fight.
    RAPHAEL
    A lumbering fighting machine clanked and rumbled past, and his horse snorted and attempted to shy. Raphael Vega brought the animal under control, but with some difficulty. He had only been riding since he had arrived in Albany, and his horsemanship was still little more than rudimentary. The steam-driven mechanical monster was one of the older models, slower and less efficient than the sleeker and more compact petroleum-driven machines that had been supplied to Albany by the Norse Union. Smoke billowed from its stack, oil leaked like black blood from between its welded and riveted plates, and somewhere inside its cramped, iron-gray interior, a sweating crew included a stoker shoveling coal into a boiler. That even the antiquated should be committed to the field indicated the desperate seriousness with which the coming fight was being treated. A few days earlier, he had heard talk among some of the staff officers. Field Marshal Virgil Dunbar, the Albany supreme commander, was personally leading the push to the south, and his long-term plan was to drive the Mosul all the way back to their original beachhead. Savannah was still the hub and nerve center of the Mosul American conquest, and it was there where they would first be surrounded, then contained. Finally, ringed with hastily constructed launch sites for Norse rocket bombs, they would be blown back into the Northern Ocean. The younger officers were completely optimistic. They had held the Mosul at the Potomac, and saw the coming task one of herding them like sheep for the entire length of the Eastern Seaboard. As far as they were concerned it presented no particular problem.
    The callow captains and junior lieutenants had not noticed Raphael listening or they might not have spoken so freely. Raphael knew they did not trust him. Not only was he one of The Four, and an over-publicized practitioner in the highly suspect paranormal arts, but he had also formerly been a lowly conscript in the Mosul infantry. Just to make matters worse in the eyes of these Albany aristocrats, he was a foreigner. Thus he failed on all levels; by criteria of class, occupation, history, and nationality, he was unacceptable, and yet they had to accept him, because they needed his powers, and also because, when he