Jack of Ravens(146)

Church stopped at one cell in which a man in his twenties wearing the rough clothes of a Tudor peasant hummed gently to himself.

‘Are you all right?’ Church asked.

The man smiled and nodded.

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Robert, the miller’s son.’

‘How did you get here, Robert?’

‘I fell asleep in the fields one night,’ he said dreamily, ‘and I awoke to the most beautiful music I had ever heard. The Fair Folk were dancing around their mound to a fiddle and pipe tune. I tried to hide, but they saw me. And the girls … the beautiful girls … asked me if I wanted to dance with them. How could I refuse? We whirled around and around beneath the light of the moon, and then afterwards they invited me back to partake of their … food and drink … beneath the hills …’ His voice trailed away to be replaced by a satisfied smile. His out-of-focus eyes replayed the scene of wonder over and over in his mind.

Church asked several others, but the story was always some variation on the same theme: of people enticed from their homes and villages by the Fair Folk with promises of wonders beyond measure. And the babies? Undoubtedly stolen from their cribs, as the old stories always said, with a changeling or a corn dolly left in their place.

Church looked up and down the aisle. Hundreds of cells, perhaps thousands, lined up like the pens at an animal-research lab. Church vowed to himself that he would find some way to return to free them.

Filled with mounting dread, Church continued towards the thrumming sound, which grew louder by the minute. What he encountered next dwarfed all his feelings about the horrors of the court.

He passed through a door that was larger than all the rest, set in a wall at least nine feet thick. There was a sense that he had also passed into an area of greater importance. Though everywhere was still white, an oppressive gloom lay heavily on the rooms and corridors. The tiles were dirtier, the grouting thick with black grease. This was an area of industrial labour, not philosophic thought. The machine sounds were now loud and resonant, like enormous hearts beating just behind the walls. Church found himself holding his breath.

More of the Tuatha Dé Danann moved around this section, their scarlet robes like pools of blood in the gloom, their masks depersonalising them until they became machine-like sentries. Church slipped stealthily through doors and behind vats or cupboards, or strange, lathe-like machines of indiscernible purpose.

Eventually he came to rows of windows that looked onto a large area of interconnecting rooms. The first thing he noticed were the numerous drainage channels crisscrossing the floor, all of them running with blood. Here the machine-noises were so loud they almost drowned out all other sound, but gradually his ears became attuned to what lay beneath: screaming, hundreds of voices rising up, mingling, different pitches, different timbres, an orchestration of agony.

There was movement in each of the rooms. As his eyes grew accustomed to the subdued lighting he saw teams of red-garbed figures busy over tables on which lay humans. At least, Church presumed they were human, for they were all in various stages of dissection, and all of them were conscious. The surgeons did not use scalpels or saws. To Church, it appeared as though they passed their hands through flesh and bone, peeling open faces, delving into organs, investigating to the very atomic structure of their subjects. Here and there, where some procedure became particularly difficult, a Caraprix would be introduced to the operation, changing its shape as it delved deeper into the bodies.

On some tables the people were being put back together, but not always the way they had started out. Some lay shaking, on the surface quite normal, but Church had seen objects introduced into brains and hearts and lungs and eyes. Others woke to find themselves with scales or wings or fiery breath. Many died in the process and their bodies were quickly removed. Others suffered terribly. On one table a pile of component parts made a sickening mewling sound.

In that moment Church understood why Tom was the way he was, and what Jerzy had also suffered. And that vista over atrocity told Church what the gods thought of humans and why his role was so important: it was a battle for survival, species against species. But it also fanned into life the first black spark of despair, small but growing, for how could he or any other human combat a race that was capable of such things, that was not even the true Enemy but which simply considered humans so far beneath them that they were accorded the same degree of concern that an abattoir worker showed to the cattle trooping past his work-station?

Sickened and reeling, Church moved away from the windows, desperate to complete his task and escape. The further he moved into the heart of the complex, the stranger and more puzzling the experiments became. Here there were no operations on humans, for which he was thankful, but what he did see troubled him on a different level.